


Thrice

by regnant



Series: Of Stag's Velvet and Lion's Blood [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Companion to Rule of Three, Consensual Incest, Domestic Violence, Drabble Every Day December, Drug Abuse, F/M, Family Fluff, Fluff, Lannicest, Lannistercest, Light Smut, Little Cersei has my heart, Sexual References, Sibling Incest, Smut, Twincest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-30 02:40:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 21,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8515381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regnant/pseuds/regnant
Summary: The sun rose and set a thousand times over the little pride, for its light lived in their hair. A collection of anecdotes set in the universe of Rule of Three.





	1. Possess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things you said that I needed to hear.

"You shouldn't let him touch you like that in front of me," he snarls suddenly, his rough right hand grasping for her ring finger beneath the blazing haze of blankets in the perfect cloak of their darkness. He spins the gold band latched around it in idle circles in paces that match the ones he draws on her bare stomach with his other hand. His eyes finally meet hers as two glances glint together in the firelight. "You know it only makes me want to kill him... Or show him whose you really are."

Her eyebrow arches like a ray of sunlight parting the curtain of darkness, an arc of molten gold painting the face that mirrors his own. "Whose I really am?" Arms reach over for him in earnest, pulling him back on top of her with a faint force. Thighs, still sticky from their coupling just some score breaths ago, amble apart lazily for brother to find his comfort in between, and halves align together as every jagged edge that might scrape or tear at any other turns flesh and makes simple sense. Supple lips, and then sharp teeth, meet with the lobe of his ear as her words escape them, rushing directly into the center of his field of hearing. "You mean _mine_?"

She can't see it, only feel it, when he smiles against her cheek at the word, but it's everything, the honeyed happiness of a featherlight kiss. "No. _Mine_."

She breathes in deeply, spices and lavender and cinnamon and sweat and their collective musks from moments before. She lets the air out slowly, repeats the motion, savoring the feeling of his skin directly against hers as their chests stir and move in perfect time together, and the hearts underneath, too. She memorizes every small dip and valley, every scar, be it from sword or from she, every little goose bump, calming now under the security of down and silk and velvet. Not a sordid layer dares to soil the moment, only to envelop the heavenly twins.

Her ringed hand moves into the mellowed caramel of his hair. Flames flicker in the shine of their union. She strokes gingerly, gently as he always loves after they are joined at the hips, bringing puzzle pieces back together after crimson bites, pulled hair, icy slaps, lion's blood, and they laugh together into each other's mouths as a single strand catches along the gold adorning her finger as she adores him. The halo of his hair captures the representation of love around her hand, and once it has spun three times around the hair, she catches it, fixes them both up. She bites her lip.

She loves him. She can't help it, and he needs her to show it, and it has always been this way. _It will always be this way._

"Yours," she murmurs in agreement. She savors the gasp at brother's lips even as it prickles her skin. His surprise seems to crystallize and hang in the air between them for a moment; it is oddly cold for the end of summer tonight. She almost never says it, but she knows that, just now, this is something that he needs to hear.

He has become as the green envy of his eyes as of late, too preoccupied with how things should be to see how they are. Jaime is the one in her bed, lavished between thighs blessed with silver and gold. He is the one spinning her ring between his fingers, not anyone else, not ever, not even the man that put it there. No matter how her husband touches her, yes, even in front of anyone, even in front of _him_ , he is the only one that makes her shiver and sigh as their blood sings in time together. He is the only one that will trace the marks that signify the beginnings of life on the expanses of her skin. Were he to venture lower, only his fingers would wander back inside of her seeking the love they made, wanting a sweet morsel to remind him of the past few moments. Only he would taste the liquor of her, their, sex on his lips, and let her taste it just the same.

It would never be the same with anyone else, and she wouldn't desire that, even if it could. He had to see that. Brother would be the one to hold and kiss their three babes come next week at their eldest's eighth nameday. He would be the one to hold him up to blow out the flickering gold of the candles upon red velvet cake adorned with a great scripted J, candles fashioned of wax blue as the pool waters next to them would be. He is the one who has taken her, loved her, claimed her, in the wake of the pawing of a wretched man at her figure, in the wreckage of filthy rage.

Try as he might, no man but sweet brother will ever possess her, not for a moment.

His hands fly to meet her face as lips and teeth gamble lower at the veldt of skin beneath him, seeking another drag of their spice.

" _Ours_."


	2. Father

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things you said when you thought I was asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt is 12 on [this list.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153010070685/prompts-1-things-you-said-at-1-am-2-things) Please feel free to leave a request in the comments!

His sweet dream lifts away slowly. Brother stills with practiced ease, slowing his breathing, only moving his hand over to feel for her. He knows not to disturb her, how much she would hate that, especially now that her little prince steals her slumber more often than not.

He only opens his eyes when fingers find nothing but silk and space on the daybed next to him. Through breathing as shallow as he can stand, his nose finds sour milk first amongst the powder and lavender hazing the dry heat of the nursery.

She always wants to look at him. Even in the late afternoon, while daylight and opportunity still splay and hang halfway in the air, there's no brightness she prefers better than the sun that lives in her, _their_ , boy's hair.

From here, though, the point of view is a bit different. Sunlight spills over sister's shoulders where the straps of her bralette should be. Her immaculate skin flows divinely uninterrupted, neck to waist, save for their son's face at her breast. He watches, still scarcely breathing, as she smiles down at the boy, sighs in contentment as he grows quiet, winces at brushes of little cub's budding teeth.

The coos spiling from her mouth as she speaks to him are almost as high-pitched as the infant's own. "Better?" Of course Joffrey can't answer her, not with words, not yet, but he and his Mother never need them. He only belly laughs, her favorite soothing sound, Jaime knows.

"Come now," she murmurs to him as she traipses back to the daybed where brother waits, her eyes never leaving the bundled babe's face. "Father is sleeping, you and I should do the same."

It's only when she says that, _"Father,"_ that Jaime dares to make a sound. The gasp escaping his lips draws her attention. She never says it, not even when she can, not even at times like this. Their eyes meet finally, and little Joffrey's great green eyes are on his uncle, _his father,_ too. She lets out a breath, almost a laugh, and it seems so heavy, almost as if it had been holding her to the ground, even though Jaime knows that he is. Their little pride, all three together now, is what keeps sister sane, safe, even embedded in the mania that is her life. Jaime clasps at her daintly ankle with his left hand, just as it was when they were born. His other hand wraps with hers around their son, and he knows that this, the way it always will be from now on, is preferable, no matter how complicated it might be.

When their eyes meet again, the corner of her mouth curls into the smallest of smiles, the sort that she might flash at him in the company of others as a lark, the sort that no one else might notice from across a crowded room.

It is a secret that only the two know.


	3. Golden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things you said with my lips on your neck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt is 52 on [this list.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153010070685/prompts-1-things-you-said-at-1-am-2-things) Please feel free to leave a request in the comments!
> 
> "Don't paint me black when I used to be golden."  
> -Clairvoyant, The Story So Far.

_The Lannister sigil is a golden lion on a crimson field._

In the times of the true monarchy, when the name Targaryen had meant something, millions of men had worn and carried him into battle with them, to live, to die, to live on in the songs even if they did die.

There would be no songs for her little lion. He had found his crimson field, but his gold had never glimmered. At best, it was invisible.

"I wish you wouldn't do this."

Ebony curls whip like the tails of a tawse at alabaster flesh as she turns to face him. "What?"

He says nothing, only looks her up and down and makes a hand gesture. Her eyes meet the vanity mirror to the side of them. He gleams next to her, gold and sea glass, like the selfsame house sigil. She is a ghost, bone and kohl. They are the Warrior and the Stranger, both rushing into battle to take life, but only one to give it. She is an anathema, a parasite, leeching from his light just to survive.

"You don't think I'm beautiful this way?"

That idea stings. Robert himself had immediately commented that the hair color did not suit her, made her look dead, _like our son,_ shirking the thought of what an effort, a concession, it was in the first place. He hardly ceased flapping his wine-stained lips about his hatred for her family with their pretentious golden hair.

He scorns her now that she could not bare him a stag, let alone a wolf pup. The last bit is unspoken, if obvious. The snow of her skin will never be enough to satisfy his thirst for the chill of the North.

"You are beautiful," he disagrees into her neck, wrapping his fingers around it, "but you are not you."

His teeth seem to tear the breath from her windpipe. She stays quiet, enraptured.

"I don't care what he prefers, and I don't care what he calls you. You're better than any of it." His maw kneads her skin, reddening the flesh, pouring blush and breath back into her. "We are." The vibrations of his voice travel to places that she has not let his hands grace since she bled out their cub. "Together." She fears the pain of losing another, that the Seven might take every babe he gets on her, before they draw breath or otherwise. _I'm not sure which would be worse._

She knows that he is right. Hates, relishes, loves, reviles it; she wishes that the rest of the world might agree.

"It doesn't matter what you do, love," he is murmuring now. "It doesn't matter how hard you try. It doesn't matter if you change, if you're faithful to him. He will not return these courtesies to you." The words have been reverent, almost seductive, up to this point, but she can feel ardor and ache behind them now. "He doesn't deserve you. Sometimes, I don't even think I do." Fingers weave between inky strands, crowning the golden roots adorning her head with adoration. "But _this_ is what we are." The words are punctuated with a harsh tug and a soothing stroke of the hair, only the bits of molten gold that pour from the crown of her head, shattering the illusion of darkness. "This is what I love." His thumb traces the greatest prominence of her throat, lavishing it even against the silence. "This is you, Cersei."

One sound does leave her lips at that. It's almost a laugh.

"Cersei," he adulates, a kiss, a lick, a nip, heat and slickness and pain penetrating her skin, and then the word comes, a sigh, a breath, a little laugh, once, twice, ten times, again and again and again. "Cersei." Fingers slide ever lower as sweet lips enthrone the name like an exaltation into her skin. "My Cersei." They meet with collarbones and the expanse of skin below, breasts still tender and engorged with milk that should be sating the babe it is, was, meant for. "My beautiful Cersei. My sweet sister." Hands cup a flattening belly bare of the marks that should silver and jolt the surface. It should be swelling, burgeoning, living, but there is only skin. The cells live in their own way, thrive and stretch and slough and die, but this is not that.

"I will say it a thousand times until you know that it is a more beautiful name than hers."

She does not stop him this time. She lets him love her as she should have weeks ago, and nine months later, a little lion cub comes forth, shining bright with pride atop the field of blood and pain this time.

The burden of death is stripped away, and the pride find their sun once again.


	4. Onlooker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things you said that made me feel like shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt is 10 on [this list.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153010070685/prompts-1-things-you-said-at-1-am-2-things) Please feel free to leave a request in the comments!

Suddenly, it clicks.

Tyrion is going on next to him, prattling about his latest book as though all the world is right, but Jaime ceases to hear him. He has eyes only for them, for the way that Lancel looks at her, the way that their postures align in a way that Jaime has seen before, if only in one half of the pair.

_Is this what we look like?_

Metal glints in the ambiance as she rocks back and forth on rose gold heels. Golden hair glows just the same. Porcelain skin seems to reflect the gaze of every man in the room, and suddenly Jaime is red sin, the other half of their house sigil. She looks like death in the slinky black number. It cloaks her important bits and not much else.

_It is the death of us. She is._

Cersei doesn't reciprocate Lancel's blatant doe eyes, turns her cheek to the sandy-haired mongrel when he finds an excuse to get too close to her face, but that makes no matter. The message is clear.

_I love you._

His words are too practiced, his gestures too well rehearsed. His gaze never leaves her.

_He loves you, too._

Her laugh is too loud.

_It's true._

Jaime has always loved the gala. In fact, he has looked forward to it all year, but never has he wanted to tear away from the ballroom more than he does right now. Cersei's eyes meet his, and that's when he turns his eyes away to regard their brother, when the pressure is too great.

Her vision is crushing him, like coal pressed into diamonds, but maybe the metaphor belongs in reverse.

_Gold may shine, even in ruin._

"It's true, isn't it?" His eyes cloud with something. He'd never admit that it is a tear. "You didn't make it up at all."

Brother peers up at brother from white-gold curls. "I wouldn't do that to you, Jaime."

"How did you find out?"

"This may not be the best time."

He's right. It's not. Sister is spinning on her heels to walk toward them, unlinking arms with their cousin.

"No. Perhaps not." He studies the tin ceiling, wishing that it might fall down upon them. At least then, this agony would be at an end. "I think Shae is waiting for you."

Tyrion disappears from his view just as Cersei fills the field of it. She arches an eyebrow, expectant.

There is a long silence.

"Be careful with Lancel, darling," he gripes icily. "You keep treating him so nicely, Father's like to marry you to him."

It could be true. Cersei's marriage is nearing its expiration date, the date when the merger will be complete, but Jaime doesn't wish to warn her.

He wishes for her to hurt like he does, and he seems to succeed.

Anyone else might miss her twinge. The blink of an eye could have concealed it, but just for that split second, Cersei freezes.

_She knows that I know._

She bounces back with practiced ease, just as though he were anyone else.

Perhaps that smarts the worst.

"At least then I'd have a child named Lannister."


	5. Globe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 21\. Things you said when we were on top of the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today is the first day of Drabble Every Day December! I will be posting one Drabble each day for you all here. Feel free to leave requests in the comments. I also have two lists of prompts, [here](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153010070685/prompts-1-things-you-said-at-1-am-2-things) and [here.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153892434665/send-me-characters-and-a-letter-and-ill-write)

His lap is her favorite place.

Many might expect her to take solace in Mother's instead, the place where she hears grand bedtime tales, draws comfort after bad dreams, but Mother and Jaime have much more in common. She and Father are both bad sleepers. Cersei and Mother have stories, but she and Father have secrets.

The realm believes that all of Father's smiles belong to Mother, but every now and then, when she works her hardest to please him, here where they both chase and evade slumber amidst crackling flame, she steals one. It stings and throbs the first time she sees him simper for her alone, and Cersei worries. It feels like stealing from Mother, like the rubies and gold that drip from her jewelry box, and Cersei half expects a lash. She has heard it so many times.

That doesn't matter. His teeth shine like sharpened pearls. Perhaps that is why they fear his smile. They dread being destroyed, reduced to a decoration for the glistening gems. The lion's maw is strong.

Cersei learns that she likes the rush, the worry behind summoning lion's pride, and she chases it. The smiles are addictive. The more she collects, the larger she wishes the stockpile to be, but it is cruelty to crave such sparse things. They are hard to come by.

She never minds after some time. Cersei finds everything that Lord Tywin can't give her in Jaime. _His_ grin cuts like a knife.

Sometimes, their smiles touch, and it is gold.

Cersei's eyes travel to see what Father's hands are occupied with. The firelight dances in the glossy paint of the globe.

"Here?" A knobby finger selects a spot at random.

"That's Myr!" Cersei says proudly. "Lace comes from there."

"The _best_ lace comes from there," Father corrects. He grasps at the knob on top, and it spins again. "And here?"

"That's Lys," Cersei answers with a frown. "I don't know anything about Lys, except that pillow houses are there. Are pillows made in pillow houses, Father?"

Lord Tywin blanches. She is the furthest from a smile that she has been tonight, and Cersei hates that. "No, that's... Who told you about that?"

"I heard one of the serving girls talking about them. She said she worked in one, but the men were very mean to her." Cersei looks down, not wanting to disappoint him. "What do they do in pillow houses, then?"

The great lion only huffs, and it seems that Lys is for another day, or perhaps never. "Do you know why we do this?" he asks, spinning the globe idly back and forth in his big hand. "Why we've done it since you were three?"

"The globe game? I was three only two years ago, Father..." Three seems worlds away to Cersei at this tender age. She knows so much more now at five, like helping Jaime with letters and seashells and her baby brother.

"I was there when you and your brother were born," he reminds curtly. "It's to teach you that any place you prick your finger on this earth, is yours." Eyes flecked with all of the gold in the vaults beneath their feet meet with hers, flickering with firelight. "Everything there is for you, you and your brother."

"Everything?" she asks. "Will we be like you and Mother? A lord and lady with little cubs of our own?"

Tywin shakes his head, nearly frowning. "Jaime will marry a woman, and you will marry another man. You cannot marry your brother."

"But Uncle Aerys and Auntie Rhaella--"

"Are not you," he finishes. "And you shouldn't call them that. Your Uncle Kevan would be upset."

"But!"

"You and Jaime will not be a lord and a lady. Jaime will be a knight," Tywin insists, judging her face.

"A knight? Like in the old times?" Cersei mislikes the sound of that. She knows that the knights of old didn't always live long, and Jaime is reckless as it is. Father says that she can't marry him, and if he says it, it must be true. Tywin Lannister's word is gold. Even so, she can't bare the thought of losing him, not like that.

"Sort of," Father admits. "He _will_ be fierce and strong, and he will train with the best fighters in the world, but logic and gold will be his most important weapons. And you, you will be a queen."

Cersei's eyes light up like wildfire at Father's words. It feels like falling in love, a joy and comfort that Cersei already knows, even if she isn't aware. "A _queen_? Will I be queen of Casterly Rock?" Her eyes kiss the globe on the ottoman in front of them with glee, finding just the spot where they splay in Father's leather chair.

She can't see it at the inception, but that's when Cersei gets her wish as his lips curl into a prideful grin. It is predatory, hateful, wonderful.

It is _hers_.

"No, my little lioness," he smirks as his hand finally finds its way into her golden hair, trailing absently through two feet of silk and then grazing her scalp, once, twice, again. She can hear happiness cracking into his level tone, and that's when she knows that he's given up the game. "You will be queen of much, much more than that."


	6. Heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A. Fire, flames, or excessive heat.
> 
> A is for Abandonment, or "the moment Cersei checked out."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today is the second day of Drabble Every Day December! I will be posting one Drabble each day for you all here. Feel free to leave requests in the comments. I also have two lists of prompts, [here](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153010070685/prompts-1-things-you-said-at-1-am-2-things) and [here.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153892434665/send-me-characters-and-a-letter-and-ill-write)
> 
> This Drabble is heavily inspired by the song To Be Alone by Hozier, which is where the opening line comes from.

Cersei is the god that heroin prays to.

In the orange of the bottle, the tablets look like sunlight, torn from the sky and kept captive for murderous nights, nights like this. They shine worship upon her face, doleful blessings of morning.

Cersei hates that. It is rest that she chases, a few hours laid up in a rug-and-tile grave before inevitable lambency.

She presses with all of her might, what little is left of it left in bony, bruised fingers, against the childproof cap. She's been wringing them even harder than Robert has, bloodying them against jagged concrete.

_No blood of my own will right this._

It had been too close this time. She'd almost lost her golden light. The images refuse to leave her mind. Terrified little Tommy with his tongue blown up like a balloon, his tiny wrist clad in the white plastic of a hospital wristlet, a wristlet printed with the name of a boarish bastard that can't be fucked to be here, an accursed charlatan that would rather inject eager bellies with misbegotten swine of their own. Instead stands the man that would have killed to give Tommen their own name, the one that has made Tommen a bastard himself in the real way, though she tries not to think of that.

She closes her eyes, calls back the reflection that would kill the man to nearly take it all away, if only she'd let him, wills her heart not to flutter with loss. Cersei doesn't know why he would, why she won't. She can't be sure why he looks to her now when he hardly has eyes for them otherwise, can't be sure if he knows why either. The holiness that they've created is demon-dulled, washed out, wrong. She's always thought that lions mate for life, and yet their little pride has all but come apart at the seams.

Jaime is picking at the threads. She almost hates him for that, knows that she never will.

She doesn't have to wonder at that, not for a moment. They may be less than they were once, but they will never be nothing to each other. They have loved too much, and that is infinitely worse in its own right.

She _does_ wonder why he says it again before he leaves, and especially why she doesn't say it back for a second time, why she freezes in the midst of their sweet fire lest it take her.

She wanted to say it back, wants to say it back now, wants to call him in rage and pain and tell him to come over, wants to writhe and burn against him, wants to forget that this is what they are now, wants to pretend that they could be what they were again. She wants to draw her power back away from him, if only for a night, but she can't. She can blame him if she likes, but she knows that this blood is only on her own hands because another man's seed has been.

She wants Tommen's father to love him again.

All of that makes no matter, not now. Neither mother nor father would ever endanger their boy, even in games of tearing at the strings of the other with foul teeth. That drunken fool is the only one to blame, for all of this, for any of it. What sort of monster doesn't know that the boy he calls son is allergic to peanuts? He has ribbed her tirelessly over the loss of her first son, all but caused that of the second.

They have never argued so badly. She has never been so angry, and she wears crimson badges of honor for it, badges that she would gladly earn again. She knows that next time she will have to bloody her own maw when the beast charges. _If there is a next time._ It's the third day, and no word. _Maybe he is dead. I should be so lucky._

That is all it takes. Bloodlust fills Cersei up. Might makes right, and the cap subsides. Inside of the bottle, the difference is clear.

The pills are glowing bone light. Death.

What Joffrey has, what Tommen fights, what Cersei craves, if only for a little while.

She turns the dull thing over in her hands, thinking that it might be best if it turned to dust, just so, just as she has. She stops, wonders if the ache she feels as she turns it back and forth in her wrist is still real after these weeks, or if she wants it to be, wants it back, _him back,_ wants an excuse not to feel real, cut in half.

She knows the answer to that question, too.

She wonders what would happen, wonders why she doesn't just do whatever the fuck she feels like, wonders why everyone else is able to gamble with her children's lives, to run in and out of them at their pleasure, but she fears grasping for her own. She wonders what Jaime might think of that, shoves the thought aside because it is the thesis of the thing.

Jaime isn't here.

Jaime is never here, not for times like this, not anymore, and it's all because of her.

She chases the pill with Martell Fire from the bottle, the perfect burn of cinnamon. It stings like sunbathed sin, like home, like _him_. It is futile, bitter against her tongue. The whiskey does not wash the flavor away.

_Perhaps this is what I deserve. Perhaps this is what I am. Bitter._

Her wretched tongue clamors for more of the taste, the taste of pain and its relief, the taste of trysts, the taste of herself.

She holds up the second pill between shaking fingers, already feeling sick.

The bathroom light benedicts them set against the cold tile, she and her only friend. It is a graceful gluttony, a litany of lusts, divinity in damnation, the eucharist of the lost.

Her tongue hums with holy communion as the second pill slithers south to quell the lake of fire.

Cersei is the god that heroin prays to, and even without the warmth of the body she craves against her, she finds raw heat in the exaltation.

She closes her eyes, and this time, as the dead dance and bleed behind them, it is sweet.


	7. Fluff

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 19\. Things you said when we were the happiest we ever were.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today is Day Three of Drabble Every Day December! I will be posting one Drabble each day for you all here. Feel free to leave requests in the comments. I also have two lists of prompts, [here](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153010070685/prompts-1-things-you-said-at-1-am-2-things) and [here.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153892434665/send-me-characters-and-a-letter-and-ill-write)

He finds her in the kitchen when he finally stumbles over too-long pajama pants from the bedroom, sated with sleep. The air is perfumed with the two of them, lavender and cinnamon, and he savors it even as it chills his naked chest. The sun cascades over her bare skin. She is a vision in red, even from the back, clad in a bralette and leather shorts of a matching hue that she must have put on this morning under her clothes, though they lay only beneath a gilded lace duster now. He hardly remembers watching her get dressed this morning after falling back into bed, sleeping so hard, tired enough to find peace even without her touch.

They had been _up late._

It is Jaime's favorite time of year, the time when the nuisance that the world has named Cersei's husband disappears for two weeks to Essos in pursuit of expanding the Baratheon side of the business, _though he doubtless spends most of that time in the pillow houses of Lys, insulting her._ Jaime needn't look at the clock to know that Cersei must have left Joffrey at the daycare already: She'd never walk around the house like this elsewise, especially not with Jaime here. It would never do for Joff to mention it to the man he called Father.

No, they are alone. Sinfully, deliciously, absolutely alone.

"I can feel you looking at me, brother," she quips without turning around.

"I was just wondering what you were doing, _sister_ ," he fibs, walking up behind her and running his hands over her curves and breathing in her scents, the embossing in the lace scraping salaciously at his finger pads in stark contrast with her soft hair, the supple skin of her neck. It is only then that he notices _what she is doing_. "Are you eating marshmallow fluff from the jar?"

"Don't _lie_ to me," she commands slyly, gripping his jaw and pulling him down for a morning kiss, spoon still in hand. "And what's it to you? Worried I'm going to ruin my girlish figure? That's awfully selfish of you."

It's hard to speak with her touching him that way, pressed so close, taking that tone of passion and sovereignty that so affects him, _oh, and she knows what it does to me,_ but he manages after a moment, even if his voice stirs in his throat the same way that her caresses threaten to make blood stir below. "I was just thinking, you haven't done that since..."

Suddenly, it comes back to him unbidden, the night of their nameday just near two months ago. She had come to him under cloak of darkness after the little party that Mother had arranged, dressed quite similarly to how she was now, though wearing green silk in place of red lace, gaudy birthday crown still atop her head, demanding a second gift from him. _"You say that I'm your one true Queen, Ser Jaime,"_ she had giggled, trying to look serious. _"Your Queen commands you to give her a Princess, a little sister for her sweet lion Prince. You won't disappoint me on a day like today, will you?"_

It had taken him a moment to process what she'd meant by that, but a short one. He had hesitated briefly, wondering if it was a good idea, if they would be found out, _if if if,_ but of course, she'd had ways of convincing him, ways which barred him from minding being convinced, ways that he loved. _"I live to please you, Your Grace,"_ he'd murmured back as they had fallen into bed, and it had been different that time, no struggles, no sibling rivalries turned raucous and ribald, lovely and almost quiet, _but that makes sense._ Jaime thinks that perhaps putting a child into his beloved's belly by accident should be very different from doing so on purpose.

"Since when?" she hums, interrupting the sweet memory as their eyes meet.

"Since you were pregnant with Joffrey," he admits, and it does feel like he's divulging a secret, though they both know, even _only_ the two.

"Yes," she nods back, smiling almost wistfully. "Yes, that's true."

The expression on her face says everything, and breath leaves him for a moment. "Are you...?" She hasn't stopped nodding, and she doesn't stop now, either, her smile only growing wider. He can hardly believe his eyes. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," she titters back, all but giving up her regal face in front of him in this happiest of moments. "I went to see a maester yesterday and everything."

His eyes are wide, drinking in the shine of her face, memorizing it, never wanting to forget. He has never been more glad for them to be sinfully, deliciously, absolutely alone. "I'm so happy..." he breathes, gripping her by the hips and swinging her around in the air, and she lets go at that. She finally breaks, laughs with abandon as her legs wrap around him. They spin to the point of ecstatic dizziness, the faces of the gods dancing behind their eyes, and the sounds are music to his ears in the blurred warmth of the morning.

_I'm so happy that you're happy._

That is the real way of it, but of course he doesn't say. He knows better than to voice it, to ruin it for her, because her happiness is his own. She is him, and if she'll love this other child, so must he. _Love by proxy._ Jaime knows that he will do what he will, not what he must, that it may sometimes be dutiful rather than beautiful, but that it will be different, too. Even if he can't be a father to this child either, not in truth, he thinks that the occasional uninhibited smile from a face like hers might be worth that pain. He thinks that maybe, just maybe, this could bring them just a little closer to being whole again.

"Do you think it will be a girl?" he asks quietly when she's back on solid ground again, when the world feels soft enough to speak, when the air is cleared of angst. "Like you wanted?"

"Yes," she answers, the words reverberating against his skin. "I _know_ so."

He doesn't know it at the time, but she's right. They will have a girl, and she will be their princess, if not always, if not at first.

His hand winds into her hair as he pulls her flush against him, closer and closer still, never wanting to let go. "Happy nameday, Cersei," he whispers, nearly trembling. "Sorry I'm late."


	8. Remember

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on "Who taught you of love?" from [this list.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/154050635305/cassandramchale-petrcv-out-of-context)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains references to domestic violence.
> 
>  
> 
> Today is Day Four of Drabble Every Day December! I will be posting one Drabble each day for you all here. Feel free to leave requests in the comments. I also have three lists of prompts, [here,](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153010070685/prompts-1-things-you-said-at-1-am-2-things) [here,](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/154050635305/cassandramchale-petrcv-out-of-context) and [here.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153892434665/send-me-characters-and-a-letter-and-ill-write)

The first time that they fuck in Robert's bed, it is the day after the wedding. She rides him as hard as she can, even after she is spent and can't find pleasure in it anymore, until she is sore inside and out, because she has to, and he twirls her gold wedding band around in his hands again and again, like a ringlet of hair. It burns, burns almost like the rest of her skin did under the water the night before as she tried to scrub away his fingerprints, but she doesn't say anything because she knows that he is scalded and scorned further, that he is pretending that he put the ring there. Jaime leaves behind her red finger skin and his red leather jacket in his wake that morning. It's the almost-too-tight one, the one that she always loves to pilfer and beg him sweetly to let her keep. " _Just one more day,"_ she'd purr against the skin of his hip, ever ready to move further south to earn the privilege. _"It smells like you."_

He leaves in it the full pack of gaspers that he'd just picked up on the way to her. He doesn't take it back this time, doesn't try to, and she wonders if he's _forgotten_ it, after all.

She hangs it in the hall closet, keeps the jacket in a dry cleaning bag to preserve his smell, vacuum seals the Laurels themselves aside a lighter and a pack of cinnamon gum for a later date, and it feels like a sin. Their tryst hides in plain sight, like an extra toothbrush at your paramour's sink for overnights, the spirit of secrecy held together in the morning only by the joy what came under clever cloak of darkness. Even if it's a secret that Cersei has a lover, though, it's far from backstairs that she has a twin, so there the leather lives, in brother's place.

The first time that Robert hits her, it is a month after the wedding. She pushes him away as hard as she can, even as his unwanted grip of her hips tightens so greatly, until she is sore of skin and bone, inside and out, because she has to, and the force of his fist throws her to the floor, light as a feather. The air has disappeared entirely, it seems, out from under her, from her lungs. Nothing burns like the blood vessels bursting beneath her skin. She wishes that it was his face burning, that he would bleed, drop dead at her feet, the only gesture of worship he could ever make.

_Worship._

She closes throbbing eyes, pictures Jaime reverent at her feet, calling her his queen, very much alive, with blood coursing south, fingers coursing everywhere, the way he has done a thousand times. She envisions Robert hanging in the closet, lavished with a necklace of rope fit for a Baratheon, next to the leather jacket still sheltered in plastic, the two laughing because they put him there. It's the only thing that keeps her from clawing at him, from opening her maw and swallowing him whole, the idea that she could choke him ten times as hard as he does her, if only once.

"Why are you _like this?_ " she rages, up in an instant and in his face, much too proud to learn whatever lesson he has intended. Fire does not die so easily. "You are not my husband. I have tried to love you, but this is not that. What sort of monster _are you?_ "

 _"Love?"_ he roars back. "Who taught you of love?"

"My father, my mother... My brother," she admits without thinking, hating herself for bleeding, dignifying the question, hating him for breathing, daring to ask. The fury consumes all common sense, leaving only bone and the means to pick at it. "None of them would ever treat me this way. They would have you killed, if I said anything about this. Any of them."

It's not true, not one bit, except when it comes to Jaime, who would murder the man with his own hands if Cersei would allow it, and in that moment, she hates all of them, everyone that she had ever known in breath or love or touch, for forcing her to preserve her safety in falsehoods.

"Monster or not, I _am_ your husband," he answers, turning his back. "But you and I will never know love, or anything like it. That... would not stand." His head shakes, almost sadly, and she reviles that worst of all, the way that he gestures like this might be a normal conversation, like he has not just struck her to the ground without even the courtesy of a single misgiving. "Your brother can love you enough for the both of us for all I care."

It is her turn to spin on her heels, not just to face away like he has, but to move for the door. She rips the closet open, pulling the jacket from the wrapping and onto her form, hoping that it will conceal the way that she shakes. She takes car keys in hand, rips the seal from what has become her emergency pack amidst trying to quit, something that she had hoped she wouldn't need disturb so soon, but nothing else will stop the stresses that he brings her. She tosses the straight between her teeth with the door half open, flips back the top of the lighter to set it aglow. Her fingerprints soil the gold surface just as his have stained her skin, and at that thought, it occurs to her that Jaime will see them, but she realizes that she doesn't care.

She sucks in a noxious breath, finds nicotine and cinnamon, and she's already halfway home.

"Robert?" she calls on her way out. She waits until she hears feet clambering as he fumbles to face her.

 _"What?"_ he bellows, more boar than stag, but that has always been his way.

"Remember that you said that."


	9. Dashboard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 16\. Things you said with no space between us.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today is Day Five of Drabble Every Day December! I will be posting one Drabble each day for you all here. Feel free to leave requests in the comments. I also have three lists of prompts, [here,](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153010070685/prompts-1-things-you-said-at-1-am-2-things) [here,](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/154050635305/cassandramchale-petrcv-out-of-context) and [here.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153892434665/send-me-characters-and-a-letter-and-ill-write)
> 
> Loosely based on the lyric "Let's take Jesus off the dashboard, got enough on his mind," from Diet Mountain Dew by Lana Del Rey.
> 
> This chapter contains smut, and Jaime and Cersei are both fifteen years old at the time. Don't like, don't read.

They are thirteen years old and near the next when Mother catches them in her bed, lips locked together for dear life, tongues tasting something that is essentially the other, hands bunching beneath shirts simply because they like each other's skin. Cersei thinks that if she could, she would wear him, his hair, his skin, his glow. She would double and burn and thicken, and she would feel complete. Cersei doesn't quite understand sex, doesn't understand the slickness that spreads below her belly, but she thinks that if she could, she'd merge with him, melt them together in some carnal kind of heat, making a seeping, crawling thing. It might look monstrous to everyone else, but he wouldn't be her brother, wouldn't be hers, he would be _her_ , and that would be beautiful. Cersei thinks that they should have been identical, should have been born conjoined, should have been born one person, anything but this ache of an existence.

She thinks the Father and his judgments are cruel.

The Mother, _their_ Mother, can be cruel, too, harsh, cold. That's as far as it has gone, and that's all that it is, liking each other's skin, wanting to wear it the only way that they know how, but Mother disbelieves.

"We were only playing," Cersei assures her. "It is the first time, and the last."

"You may tell me whatever you like," Mother answers sternly, "but the gods are always watching."

_Mother has reason to disbelieve. That is evident now._

They are fifteen years old and near the next when Father gifts them a car, a Heaven, and teaches them to drive. He thinks that it will give them independence, but really it only serves to exacerbate their codependency as they spend every waking moment that they can away from Mother's prying eye. She makes sure to leave her mark, though, before they set out anywhere on their own. Mother fastens a ceramic sept in miniature with hook and loop tape to the dashboard of the car. The Father faces them from his wall, bone china eyes downcast but somehow still seeing. "May they always protect and keep you," she says, nearly happily, until Tywin turns away and crimson truth comes out from behind absinthe eyes. "The gods are always watching."

Mother has always been more devout than Father would ever dream to be, and more observant of things besides those she wishes to see, if one seeks to be honest. Perhaps it is true what everyone says about him ruling the Kingdoms and the Rock and her ruling _him_.

None of that matters parked out by the cliffs. There is no Mother and no Father in this car save in the little sept, only sister to rule brother, which she does, she _is_ , differently tonight. It has been a long time since they have been this close, this feverish, and Cersei has never felt so passionate, so _ready_. Lips lock together for dear life, and her tongue darts out for something that is essentially him, _them_ , and Cersei knows it's power. Their hands clutch together in the fabric in search of skin, pulling shirt, dress, over head, and she slides his fingers where she wants them when he stills.

"We shouldn't," he murmurs against her with a shake of his curly hair, and it is as futile as she is beautiful. "We shouldn't do this, Cersei."

"We should," she disagrees, guiding his hand further down toward the waistband of her underwear, the last thing she's left wearing, the last place he hasn't ventured toward just yet. "We should, we should. I want to, don't you want to? Don't you love me?"

"Of course I do," he exalts below her, and it's almost disbelief, a blasphemy in the face of their idolatry. It comes so low, so rushed, that an untrained ear might think it another language, and the instrument cluster light dances in his green eyes when he looks up in reverence. "You're my sister. Of course I love you."

"Don't you want to love me this way, too?" She might pout were she someone else, and her lips do form into something close, just the same.

"I think..." His eyes are crazed, perhaps too much so for proper speech. _I did that to you,_ she wants to say. _You're mine. I own you._ "I think I already do. I always did."

"Don't you want to make me feel good?" Nimble fingers unbutton, unzip his pants as she speaks. His breath hitches, but he doesn't protest. "I want to make you feel good." Their hips rock around the last two wretched layers obscuring perfection, and his moans turn to hums against her lips. " _So_ good," she sings as she straddles him, pushing ever closer. She wants to push with finger and fist and tooth until they bleed and throe and heal, until every cell of his skin tastes as metallic as the lip she's chafed and severed with greedy teeth. "It could be better."

He sighs against her. It's almost happy, almost permission, but then she feels him tense. "Mother said..." She watches as he eyes the figure set before them, meant to separate them, and she nearly rages at the idea of its success.

"Is that what you're worried about? I'm sure the Seven have enough on their minds." She rips the porcelain from the dashboard, shudders at the sound the tape makes at coming unclasped, tosses it into the backseat, wills it to break. It doesn't. "It is just a sculpture, Jaime. It is a statue, and I am a living girl. A living girl who wants you, sweet brother." Her index finger finds his lips, silencing whatever response he may give in favor of a kiss. "Fuck Mother. Fuck _me_." She almost amazes herself when she finally says it, but she isn't sure why when they have done everything but, have slicked each other's skin in friction and heat, rubbed together and felt the world fall apart and come back together again without an inch left between them.

"Cerse... Cerse, I want to." Hearing her voice her needs out loud has entranced him, and he rips at the wear separating their skin until they can shrug it away. When they touch, he hisses like rainwater might against the hood of the car in this heat, and she notices that it actually is sprinkling as she thinks of that. The air cools, and it only worsens the heaviness between them as the signature salt of the Rock poisons the air. "I need you."

They join hands as she bucks into him, and she can feel him growing against her, for her, as they rub together. "This is how it should be," she proclaims proudly for anyone to hear, anyone at all, even those gods that Mother fears and she doesn't. _Let the Father judge us,_ she thinks. _Let him judge us cock in hand and fuck fury into the Mother watching us. Let her birth a new world into being of it, a world where we might be permitted to exist._ Her back arches until their chests touch. _What's another blasphemy amidst damnation?_ "I'm so wet for you. And you're so hard for me." The pace quickens, and she grows madder by the minute without him. "I want you to make love to me, Jaime. I need you in me."

What Cersei doesn't know is that she is _wrong_. She wants Jaime to do far more than make love to her, satisfy her. She wants brother to give himself to her and take her just the same in a brutality that only the two know. It is a thing to be learned by doing, though, and they figure that out quickly. "I want it, too," he says, grasping her face. His eyes are louder than his lips ever could be. "I want to be inside you."

"Then do," she says, guiding him to her entrance with her hand as she dips down. They both release breath at the feeling, and the exhale is innocence. It is fear, leaving. She stills above him for a moment, trying to get her bearings as he stretches her for the first time. His eyes grow sour when he knows that she is hurting, bleeding a little, and so they kiss for awhile before moving again, and that's nice. She bites his lip again, harder than she intends, but he doesn't mind. She almost thinks that he likes it. It opens for true this time, and they bleed and bay together.

It is only fair. The twins share everything, even pain.

When the pangs subside, they find bliss together. She rides him with all of her might, sheathing him as deeply as she can, but it isn't quite enough. "Push into me, baby boy," she coos into his ear. The name is new, but somehow, it feels right. "I need to feel you fuck back against me."

It's not until he thrusts up into her that his fingers stroking at her heat bring Cersei to see stars. It's not until the pleasure doubles that she does, doubles and burns and thickens, because she is finally one with him, wearing him, his hair sticking to her neck, his skin like a song against hers, basking in his glow, and she feels complete. She has merged with him, and they have melted together in carnal heat, a seeping, rutting thing. It might look monstrous to most anyone else, but he is not her brother, he is not hers, he is _her_ , and that is beautiful. They are identical, save for where they are joined, and they are joined. They are one person, and the ache dissipates into waves as her cunt flutters around him, squeezing him for everything he has.

"I love you," he says weakly, overcome with ferocity.

"I love you," she answers fiercely, not done yet. "I love you so much that I want to be you."

His eyes harden, with lust or the remark, she isn't sure. It seems like both. "You are me, Cersei. You are me. I am you." He pulls her hips down as hard as he can to meet his own, again and again, and there are no more words then. There is no effort behind it then, only instinct, and the noises they make reflect that. He fucks up at her with abandon, and that's when she understands that this is what she needs, what she likes best.

"I'm so close," she murmurs idly. "So close, Jaime, I..."

His hand leaves her hip to touch her face, and it isn't a grasp, it's a caress. "You're going to do it again for me, Cersei," he commands with a light tug of her hair, and it's new to her, this Jaime, but she likes him. She loves him. She wants to finish _for him_ more than she wants to do it for herself when he takes this tone with her. "Finish with me."

He pinches her clit, hard, as he spills himself inside of her, and it hurts, hurts so _good_ that she obeys him. She hardly has time to gasp before her climax takes her. The world is full and warm, and it holds not one worry as they rock out the feeling together. He holds her against him as she steals her breath back from his lungs in a lingering kiss. When the world has righted itself again and the dizziness subsides, she lets herself relax.

_Finally._

With their legs still tangled, Cersei reclines back onto the dash to look at her brother, her lover. She splays right where the statue lives, wearing a smile, and she can tell by the gleam in his eye that Jaime knows that the only one watching, judging, is her.

The Seven have other things on their minds.


	10. Crave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 47\. Things you said in a hotel room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For tumblr user velatavelenosa.

_This kid better look exactly like me._

Jaime sips at the can of Wings stashed in the cup holder beside him, willing the caffeinated confection to keep him awake. The road seems to stretch blacker and bigger before him as time goes on. Somehow, the hourlong drive _back_ from Lannisport feels longer than the time it took to get there, even though the trip is actually passing faster.

Jaime looks to the passenger's side, the comfort food there his only companion on this long drive, insulated in layers of foil in spite of them enjoying the warmest climate north of Dorne. Headlights reflect in the silver, coloring the cream interior. Quiet classical music has pleasantly hummed its way about the corners of the rental car up until now, but after miles of monotony, it threatens to lull him to sleep, and he moves to turn the dial, searching for something more lively. He settles on a loud rock song and lets the thrashing rhythms and dull navigation voice guide him home to her.

Tonight, home is the Royal suite in a five-star hotel where Father has stationed them for the next week on a set of business errands. Jaime wishes that Father hadn't done this, had put the errands off because _"Cersei is due just two weeks from now and really shouldn't be doing much."_ When Jaime had pointed this out, though, Tywin had given him the same old lecture about legacy and The Important Lannister Reputation with a few changed words, and he'd tuned out, accepting his task.

A stay closer to the Rock has them both quite homesick, Jaime especially: It has perhaps hurt him worst of the Lannister siblings to leave home in favor of staying close to her. Cersei is the one to express it aloud, though, and her expression comes in the form of a clamor for their old childhood favorite, seafood pasta with cheese. _"The crab in King's Landing tastes like seasoned shit,"_ she whines. _"I miss the real kind we always ate."_ Could someone else have easily been paid to bring the food? Yes. Did Cersei worry that unnecessary visitors might draw attention to them, prompting little birds to try and peer through the hotel windows? Also yes. Thus, Jaime himself had set off on this journey to procure what she wanted.

Cersei may be high-maintenance and domineering, but Pregnant Cersei is impossible. _Luckily, she won't be pregnant much longer._

He wonders what Mother Cersei will be like at that.

Jaime drives with the windows down, and for a moment that makes him think of smoking, a habit he hasn't indulged in months, since Cersei can't. He can almost taste the very last gasper they had split before she'd had to quit, but thinking of that only makes worse cravings of his own. He pushes that away, filling his nose with crisp, salty air and the smells of the bounty next to him, which admittedly _is_ better than that of any sea fare they have back home. He lets his thoughts carry him for the rest of the drive, which isn't long.

He fumbles with the room door for a moment, hands overflowing, before he sees her there in bed laid up in bra and underwear, half obscured by the wraparound body pillow and fuzzy blankets she needs to sleep now that hotel sheets and detergents and most anything seem to break her out. She looks exhausted, drained of color, but his little movements under skin keep her animated. Jaime thinks that she looks like the Mother might, touching her bare belly and saying something, lips forming words from behind a tired smile.

_She's talking to him._

He stops to listen before calling out to her from the entryway of the suite, letting her know that he's there. "Ow, ow! Get out of there, would you?" Jaime almost chuckles, but he knows better. Their son has spent a disproportionate amount of time up in her ribs lately. _It is a wonder she doesn't bruise._ "Don't worry, Daddy will be back soon," she whispers, like it is a truth that only the two can know, which of course it is. "He only left since I told him we were hungry."

Part of him wishes that she wouldn't say things like that. For now, it it sweet, it is _right_ , but once the child is born, he knows that the taste will sour in his mouth when another man holds the babe, claims him for the world to see, and Jaime almost rages at that.

"Hey."

She turns to look at him, her smile growing a bit. "We were just talking about you."

"I heard." He moves to sit next to her, only then noticing the cardboard takeaway box on the bed. "You ordered a pie?"

She shrugs, nonchalant. "I got so _hungry_."

Brows arch in disbelief. "Cersei, I just drove an hour each way _because you were hungry."_

"I couldn't wait for you." She thrusts the box at him. "Here. I saved you some."

"Maybe I should just eat your pasta. Since you don't want it."

"No, I want it! ...I'm already hungry again," she admits sheepishly.

Jaime can't help it. He bursts with laughter, setting the food aside. "Of course you are." He reaches over to give her a kiss, a kiss that quickly deepens, and before they know it, he's all but pouncing on top of her. "Just for food, hmm? Or something else?"

"Stop it," she giggles, waving him away. _She never means it when she says it like that._ "He's awake in there. You know, the baby you put in me. _That_ way."

"I seem to recall you begging me to put him there," Jaime retorts, grinning.

" _Begging_?" A flash of emerald murder glints toward Jaime at that, and he knows she wants him to fear it, but all he can do is savor it.

"'Oh, Jaime, fuck me harder,'" he mocks in the highest voice he can manage, earning him a play hit and then a nipple pinch. He cries out at that, only using it to further his point. "'Oooooh, sweet brother, just like that.'"

"That isn't _begging_. That is _directing_." She bites her lip, trying to conceal what might be a slight embarrassment, but he isn't sure why. They hardly have boundaries with each other, and they never feel shame. _Is it really because of the baby?_

"Oh, so that's what you want to call it?" he teases as he flicks her on the nose, wanting to see her smile again. "Directing?"

"Yes," she murmurs, untieing the plastic bag around the food and removing one of the containers from the foil along with a plastic fork. "Now, stop talking about it. At least until he stops moving. I don't want Joffrey hearing your filth."

He doesn't even gloat on being right about her being embarrassed. Jaime pulls back, flummoxed. "Joffrey? You picked the name without me?"

"I'm just trying it out," she adjusts, smoothing things over. "While you were gone, we napped, and I dreamed that he was born. He looked just like you, and you called him Joffrey." A small smile graces her lips. "It starts and ends with the same sounds as your name. It would be like naming him after you. And it's my favorite of the ones we talked about."

"Joffrey," he repeats, tasting the name on his tongue. It feels foreign at first, but when it settles, it's perfect. "Hi, Joffrey." He slides down her body to meet her belly, watching his son move inside of it. _We surely are strange creatures, to be made this way._ "I'm back now. I missed you two." He reaches his hand out to touch her skin, and he has to keep himself from jumping back when something, _his hand?_ reaches out toward him. "You know who I am, don't you? Even in there."

"Of course he knows you," she answers, careful to swallow before speaking. _A hungry lady is a lady still._ "He's calming down now. I daresay he missed his father."

"He'll be missing me quite often after he's born, then." Jaime turns to look into Cersei's eyes as he says that, never moving his hand, and they stare at each other for a long moment.

"I wouldn't let that happen, Jaime," she says quietly. "You may not be able to call him son, not at first, but... I'll be bringing him to the office with me, in the beginning. You can see him most every day. You'll always be a part of his life. He will need you to be. I'll need you to be."

Part of Jaime mislikes the sound of that. He wants, more than anything, to be a father to his child, but he has to wonder how painful it will be to do it halfway. He has had a taste of it with Robert gloating about putting a child into Cersei at the office to the other pigs around the wine cooler, his prowess the night that _he believes_ he did it, thinking himself to have _"good swimmers"_ because Cersei _"was not even the first woman I fucked that day."_ His hatred for the man has only intensified on this tumultuous journey to Joffrey, _yes, that is his name now,_ being born. Following his boasting session, Robert had turned to Jaime and dared to make the crude comment to end them all upon surveying his face. _"What's the matter, Lannister? Can't handle the thought of me fucking your sister?"_

_Ten times as well as you'd handle the thought of me fucking your wife._

"Jaime? Are you alright? What are you thinking?" He looks up, noticing that she has finished eating while he was lost in thought.

"Something that would embarrass you, I think," he admits quietly. He hopes that Robert's way of speaking about Cersei hasn't reached her ears, but knows that it probably has.

"I would think you'd be much closer to smiling if it were something... like that." Her face falls when he doesn't grin back at her, and that makes him feel bad. "He likes your voice, Jaime. Why don't you say something else to him?" She presses her hands over his own, emphasizing the touch of three bodies come from two that should have been one. "Something we'll all like. Something for you and I to remember when you _do_ miss him, when things get hard."

Cersei doesn't know it, or perhaps she ignores it, but Jaime has a sinking feeling that the two will have need of this memory, that things will get harder than they can imagine in relation to their son. He knows that he needs to make it good, while he still can, say these things while he still can, before another man steals his only chance. Jaime could swear that this will be his only chance, his only _child_ , though Cersei has told him that there will be more, but not how she knows.

"Joffrey," he murmurs again, lips grazing skin. "You listening?" There is a moment before Jaime can feel the boy stirring again. "Your Mother and I both are very happy that you'll be here soon," he tries, looking to her for approval. She brushes her fingers through his hair as he speaks. "We both care about you very much, and me, well... I would never let anyone hurt you." He says it like a swear, an oath, because he means it. It's the one thing he'll always be able to give. "Not in this life or the next."

There is a long silence, and she only speaks once they are both sure that he will stay still. "Thank you, Jaime," she whispers. "For the food, for coming with me, for him... For everything." She reaches over to pull him closer. "Now, we should be getting to bed. We have a very early morning, and I know you're tired."

"Yes..." He hasn't realized it until just now, but he is very tired from the drive. "Early morning?"

"Yes. I booked a photographer before our business meeting tomorrow. I haven't had a chance to take my maternity photos, and you have to come with me."

"Why?" he asks. "You want me to?"

"Because nude maternity photos are a new trend, especially of attractive young mothers, something I wouldn't want anyone asking of me if I am caught alone," she quips, annoyed. "Besides, it's customary for the father of the child to be there, no?" He watches as she grins in the half light of the room, and he can't help but do the same.

"You're right, of course. It wouldn't do if anyone tried to take advantage of you. I only rescue maidens."

Cersei is the first to laugh at his cruel jape. "Naughty," she chides, nibbling his lip at the end of their kiss. "Oh. And Jaime?"

"Hmmm?" he moans back, half asleep, blissed out, if only temporarily.

"You and I don't seem to agree on the meaning of the word _beg_ ," she informs him adeptly. "Perhaps we need to settle this debate before bed." She grins wickedly up at him, cheeks already flushing. "You must make me understand _your_ definition of the term a bit better."

So, he does.


	11. Password

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 44\. Things you said before you kissed me.
> 
> Shameless domestic sibling rivalry fluff. I know, I know, self-indulgence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was inspired by tumblr user cerseilionesslannister, specifically one of her headcanons as explained in [this post.](http://cerseilionesslannister.tumblr.com/post/153198244537/headcanons-about-the-different-facets-of-cerseis) I felt that it was particularly suited to the beginning of the story of this verse... So I hope you all enjoy.

"Myrcella, be careful with those!" Cersei watches carefully as her daughter carries a pair of safety scissors back to the bedroom she now shares with her brother, rising from her perch on the sofa, ready to catch her should she fall. "Don't run! Make sure you hold them by the loops."

"She knows how to hold them," Jaime assures, standing to meet her. "I taught her. Didn't I?" He turns to glance at their girl, Cersei in miniature, _and she truly is._

"Yes," little Cella blurts coyly, looking up at him. "Uncle Jaime says princesses don't run with scissors, only walk, and that the holes in the bottom are like the hilt of my sword." She thrusts her hip out proudly, displaying the wooden toy tied around the waist of her tulle skirt. _Robert would hate her playing with swords, but then again, Robert isn't her father._ "Knights don't hold their swords by the blade. That would be silly."

"Well, he's right." Cersei blinks, befuddled. "Go on, then. But be careful." This is decidedly _new_. Cersei has always been the one to teach her children most everything, a single mother in all but name. Tommen and Myrcella have always had their uncles for company, and now since the separation, _one_ of them present on a daily basis in the home, but she's far from used to the idea of one of them knowing anything she doesn't. It almost feels like a secret, a stolen moment.

It almost hurts.

The last thing Cersei knows how to handle with regards to parenting is surprises, particularly those coming from outside influences, though the past few weeks have been full of them.

"Careful with the children," sister advises brother when babygirl has left their field of hearing. "In spite of it all, I have them more or less convinced that their mother knows everything."

"Is that so?" he hums next to her, still watching the space where their daughter stood moments ago, almost affectionately.

Cersei rolls her eyes. Though Jaime has been basking in the newfound fascination directed his way, it is just that, _new_ , yet to be stable until he proves himself more permanent than history indicates. That, of course, is when the not-so-pleasant parts might come into play, the parts he isn't so good at, at least not yet. _You still can't charm your son into eating his beets._ "You don't have to gloat so much, you know."

"And you don't have to be so jealous," he counters, grinning.

 _"Jealous?"_ Her brow furrows, peeling gold leaf on marble. _He_ is the jealous one, after all. She isn't sure why she's so offset by his jeer. Bickering has become a part of their daily routine now, if only for the thrill of _resolving_ the conflicts.

"You heard me," he murmurs with a smirk, drawing her closer even as she twists in his grip, defiant. She reaches out to kick free, and he catches her bare foot in his palm.

"Heelgrabber," she bites back, pulling free.

"Brotherfucker," he taunts above her, eyes growing in anticipation of whatever she'll do next. She can't help but gasp. She knows that he is deliberately riling her up, only baiting her out of her stony exterior so that she'll play his game, yet she's helpless in the wake of it, has to take it.

"I'll show _you_ a brotherfucker," she sneers, backing up a pace.

"I'm sure you would anyway," he seduces insistently at her ear. The words are barely a breath as he steps right back into her space.

"You sure you know what I'm going to do, sweet brother?" She grasps the wine glass on the table next to them and hurls the dregs at him. It sluices through his hair like blood atop a sea of melted gold. Locks hang with the weight. She can't help but think that he looks beautiful like that, a warrior draped in curls of gilded mail depressed by the burden of death. The pause is almost her undoing. His mouth widens, first a symbol of shock occupying the center of his face, and then the corners pull apart into a sly grin. She turns on her heel, the same heel that was just in his hand.

"You're _dead_!"

The words should hold murder, but instead he inflects them with little more than competition, and beneath it, neither can help but laugh. She races down the stairs, him just steps behind. The giggles and paces together have her all but losing her breath. She's almost in the clear until she trips over her feet, and that's when he grabs her again. Before she can find which way is up, she feels her hands being seized by calloused, larger ones, lifted above her head, and her back pressed against the wall, and _him_.

It takes everything in her to pretend that it isn't what she wanted all along.

"Let me _go_ , Jaime!"

"No," he asserts. "I don't think so."

"Yes," she insists, pouting as she struggles against his grip. It only makes the friction between them worse.

"You can't cute your way out of this," he footles, shaking his head. She instinctively puckers her lips as droplets of wine fly toward her face. "You'll have to guess the password."

 _Of course._ She should have known that Jaime would deign to do this, given the chance. This is one of his favorite games, left from when they were small, though it tends to be much more _physical_ these days. She knows from experience that she has no chance of being let go.

"Is it, 'please'?"

He laughs a little. "No."

"Is it, 'password'?"

"'Password' has not been the password since we were five," he rebukes, rolling his eyes. "You're not using enough words."

 _That is hardly fair._ Cersei hates herself for thinking a thing like that. She really is acting childish now, just as childish as _he_.

"Is it, 'Jaime is amazing'?"

"Better," he allows with a little nod, pretending to think about it, "but no."

"Please, Jaime, my hands are going to go numb!"

"You should have thought of _that_ ," he whispers, grinding their hips together, "before you spilled your wine so carelessly, Cerse."

It's too much, the pressure up above, down below, the childhood nickname brought further to life. Breath is thick between them. The world grows hot, and Cersei feels greedy. She can scarcely think, scarcely _wants_ to think; She'd much rather give into his advances, lips, teeth, breath, even with the children upstairs, even with the door open...

Suddenly, it comes to her, and she almost doesn't say, because she can't be right, can she? _It's far too silly._

"Is it... Is it 'I love you'?" Her eyes search his, waiting for a cackle, a jibe, a _no_.

"Yes," he murmurs back, his lips a moment from her own, "but now I don't want to let go."


	12. Cersei

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> R. A deafening sound
> 
> R is for repentance, or "You can never lose yourself while I exist."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vaguely smutty, but not explicitly. This piece is more reflective than anything.
> 
> And, of course, a dash of sexualized narcissism, because what JxC fic is complete without that?
> 
> I would LOVE comments and honest opinions on this chapter. I think it might be my favorite thing that I have ever written.

"Who are you?"

Yesterday morning, the answer to his question had been easy. Brother had come to sister, gold tie already affixed set beneath his bone white collar, and sister had accepted brother, red lipstick already affixed set above her bone white dress. He had brushed aside the tufts of Lyseni tulle and the lofts of Myrish lace, and she had brushed aside the vows she was expected to say, the place she was meant to take. They had fucked on all fours, needily, lions for true making a veldt of the fabric in the veil of raptures and roars, manes hanging into her face until two were one, and that was when he had asked,

_"Whose are you?"_

_"Yours,"_ she had said as divergent tremors began inside of her, three times, _"yours, yours."_

Though she had truly meant the words, this made them no less a lie. She had fixed her lipstick, lowered her skirts, forged into the sept, and proclaimed herself as being for _another_.

This morning, the answer is infinitely less clear. She is covered in the seed of one man and the handprints of another, one as milky as their skin, the other purple as the scent of her favorite flower. Lavender has always kept her calm, except for now, and the same goes for their essences mixing together at the apex of hale thighs. She has _taken_ him, thrust herself onto him beyond pleasure, beyond measure, for every parry she wishes she could have made last night, _taken_ her rights from him like a woman king bleeding regnancy rather than a money launderer's consort leeched and leaking despite a long-broken maidenhead. This morning, after _taking_ him, she finds no comfort in the idea of ownership.

It is not the same, knowing it from the other side, now.

The only problem, _not that there are not others,_ is that he hasn't asked her _whose_ she is this time, but _who_. She keeps eyes closed against the sun streaming through the curtained window, the sun that lives in his hair, _their_ hair. For a moment last night, from far away, black curls had sprawled together as the sun had disappeared behind the clouds of grey eyes. The cloak of darkness had seemed the only thing in the world fit to enamor him. She is so sure that it had been that way, for him, for the evidence had spilled from his lips like diluted dregs of wine from felled stemware. She'd about felt like that, breaking and seeping red like maiden skin, shattering at the vibration of a breath, a word, a love.

_Lyanna._

Part of her wants to say it, too.

_"Who are you?"_

_"Lyanna."_

_It might not hurt half so much if I could mean it._

She knows better, or at the very least, _he_ does, and he won't let her go. His touch is the only thing that holds her to the ground. She is only half dead in his heat.

"I am a living girl," she tries. Lyanna Stark is stark white, even more so than they, rotting and bloodless, a wolf whose pelt she might wear. In no other way may she ever walk the earth again. She does not know the pleasure of the cinnamon of brother's breath at her neck, his nibbles there coloring her cheeks, spreading flowers sweeter than any winter rose.

She can feel him shaking his head where they are nestled together, because at least touch still makes sense, and taut digits circumscribe her sharp jaw, pushing her face straight forward.

"Who are you?"

Eyes open to regard the mirror in front of them, the reflection of her reflection, and she sees herself there. Curls splay and tangle together like spun gold there, and springing force pries the fetid mop of dragonglass from her mind. It is the light of the west, the light of the world writ twice on the surface, hidden from the eyes of gods and men, leaving their horizons colorless and dark. They are four legs, four arms, two chests, two heavy breasts, a single sex of one cock at attention and one cunt spread open, twenty toes, twenty fingers. Ten tinge his back with moonlight as five laze just above her center, the center of the world, and five more dip just so into the supple flesh of her neck, never taking air like _he_ had, only savoring the feeling of it entering this living body, this doubly made thing that they call a love.

"I am you."

He refuses, again, and that is grievously unfair. A gilded halo of violence shakes in the denial, and she almost breaks, almost shakes, almost loses what little is left. Hands wander about curves, curves that were only ever made flesh for him, curves that have been violated in mortal sin, sin that still purples her with fingerprints, reddens her skin still from scrubbing under white hot water. Fingers find her heat, wrap into it, fill it from the outside, clutch it, clasp it like it is being ripped away from him, from them, because it is.

_He won't let that happen._

The sins don't matter, because they are the only two gods to walk the world, and he forgives her.

"Who are you?"

Ten become twenty. Fingers lace as they brace against the wall, facing the floor-length mirror before them. She sees twice emerald eyes, menacing smile, gnashing teeth, glinting golden hair that whips around them. She watches, staring into her own eyes, just a kiss from the looking glass, as he completes her, fills her, as two become one, as their manes blend again, as they fuck on all fours, lions making a veldt of the glass for true in the haze of their breath as they roar. It is her own moans that she savors, her own faces that she favors. She clenches him as hard as she can because she wants to watch herself unravel, feel her gaze grow heavy until lids will not bare waking, feel thighs tremble until they will not bare aching, see them multiply just as she has doubled and divided before lusty eyes.

She wants to see the end of the world, or maybe the division of the first cell of a new one.

The question comes at her ear, a susurration, a thousand of them, until they take each other again, too far, until he can't make it past the first syllable, until it is a sigh, a grunt, until bites better suit the pressure she exerts, until they are far too guilty, too gilded to ever show dirt, until he doesn't need to ask, as fingers tightly clasp. Two throats know the answer after he asks, as they collapse, and it is a breath, a word, a love.

"Cersei."

_Cersei. My name is Cersei._


	13. Cousin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on ❛ it’s ugly and obscene to our beauty-spoiled eyes, isn’t it? ❜ from [this list.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/154050635305/cassandramchale-petrcv-out-of-context)

She had hoped that it would be different.

In the spin of drink and dust, tinged with fairy lights redder than the wine housed in her hands, he had roared poetry like soft murder to eager ears. The fingers of soldiers, rallied in lovelorn words of gold, had snapped back at him like bones on the battlefield. Hair held straight under burdens of blood landed in absinthe eyes, and suddenly, she was _home._

They had stumbled to the back of the bar, burned their mouths on Martell Fire. Rhymes had slithered from his lips, and she had captured them in a kiss. The neon lights of King's Landing had swum past them in the frenzied delirium of the cab ride. There had been a thousand chances to say no, an elevator attendant breaking the fever, two wrong key turns, taunting, _stop, stop,_ the threshold closing in around her face, _or was that just his fingers in my hair?_

She had never heard them. The elevator had found his floor, thrumming in hungry haste all the way. The third key turn had been the charm, the green apartment door chanting _gogogo_. He had picked her up by the hips, swung her over the doorway, spike heels singing of want as they kissed the flesh of tile beneath.

She had hoped that the salt of sweat would be better than tears, that his impression in the twin mattress might make a twin shape of its own. She had hoped that under cloak of darkness, the differences might disappear, but in the afterglow, they shine. The sand of his hair crumbles where gold would hold fast. Where muscle should ripple, skin creeps, scarcely holding the secrets beneath. The body beneath her easily suffers her weight, only half the size it should be. He never ruts back up at her, never wrestles boastfully for control, never whispers encouragement or love. He writhes, grasps, sighs at best beneath her, beneath _him,_ in every sense of the term.

A cousin is not a brother.


	14. Rock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Casterly Rock is carved out of a great stone hill colossal rock beside the Sunset Sea. It is popularly believed to resemble a lion in repose at sunset._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> V. An abandoned or empty place (for tumblr user cerseilannisterr)
> 
> V is for veracity, or "you can't lose yourself just because you lost him."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt is from [this list.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153892434665/send-me-characters-and-a-letter-and-ill-write)
> 
> This was requested by tumblr user cerseilannisterr, who is a great person and a good friend of mine! I hope all of you enjoy it.

It has been _years._

Salt thunders against stone in the thrumming constant of the tide. Humming waves squeeze sediment from the cliffs like larcenous heartbeats. She can recall countless times that this rhythm has lulled her to sleep, the sound rivaled only by brother's breath at her neck. Just feet ahead of her lies the mattress where he would come to steal her sleep, to partake of it in a heap of lingering limbs, if only for minutes rather than hours. It lolls, careless and naked before her, and Cersei remembers other times that she saw it that way, stripping it, flipping it, concealing love stains left on and below sheets.

Every second had held a story back then. Now, they seem to blend together the way that she and brother once did. Days seem to blacken, to bloat along, to lack life. _Like he does._

She only wishes that they were here on happier terms.

_He would have loved it here, like me, like his father._

None could deny that Joffrey had been a true lion cub, fierce as the one that leapt across their house banner, and if they did, they would never dare do so to his mother's face for fear of her maw. He had belonged here, when he had belonged anywhere, _but of course, that is out of my hands now._

He will only see the Rock through painted eyes of stone concealing precious emeralds. He will only ever know the sept, the Hall of Heroes, for the gilded shroud has shielded him from all else. Golden hair can only hope to halo his head in the next life. She can only be grateful that, here, he will find quiet among the murmurs, his bones, his heart, his untold lineage. Cersei has been careful with the interment, the stone that will mark his place. It would not do to dishonor his memory with an untruth.

_"Joffrey, firstborn child of Cersei, beloved son, brother, and nephew."_

_Surely last names are not needed in the afterlife._

Cersei doesn't particularly believe that the afterlife exists, nor the gods. In light of her transgressions against them, it is best that way.

Traditionally, only soldiers have usually been interred at the Hall of Heroes, those that have died valiantly in battle, but Cersei has fought just as hard as her son may have to bring him here. She has endured flout and fist from the monster she calls a husband for him to find himself where he belongs, finally.

Cersei smells the Sunset Sea through the open floor-to-ceiling window. It is almost a comfort. Closing her eyes, she sees him, smile golden as his hair, stripped to his smallclothes, diving into the watery caverns below the Rock. Of course, water had been his end, hadn't it? _Blue glass and white stone. His body shattered the surface, and the stone shattered his body._ She thinks, only for a moment, of the water below, the sharp rocks that she is but a breath from, how she might shatter upon them, if it would be beautiful, how short that breath might be.

_It could be my last. It could leave my body, the way that he left my arms._

_No._

"It's almost time."

When first brother speaks, naught but the wine glass in her hand shifts, coming up yellow roses as liquid all but spills about rouged lips. She's been at least a little drunk all day, but no one dares to fault her on this front. It keeps a haze between her and the pain, between this life and what lies beyond, beneath. The spinning of the room dances behind the aegis of blindness, and she is almost safe despite dancing on the brim of the sea, teetering on the brink of a silent suicide. She chooses white wine these days, tinting the world gold like the lion she has lost, not the crimson that had leeched like life from him, soiling her hands.

She doesn't deign to turn around, not yet, instead holding onto her little illusion, her little lion. She knows that when she gives up the game, leaves absinthe eyes unshielded by lids and alcohol, she will be back in the room, and she will see his face animated once more, yet writ only upon the body of her brother, her lover, and that is the greatest horror of all.

She isn't sure if she can handle the sight, not in light of what's to come, the face of the father that had never quite loved his son, the chance she never quite gave, had to give. _Perhaps I could have. Perhaps I should have._

The little pride is not quite a lie, but perhaps a fantasy, a _story_ for true, without its crown prince to leave pawprints in the Sunset shore sand.

_He would have loved the lions most._

"Cersei. We have to go."

Eyes open now, yet she can still see him, his laughing mouth with every tooth where it belongs, peering in at the lions romping within the belly of the Rock, surveying each cavernous step of the Lion's Mouth as they climb it, stalagmites and stalactites forming dentition of their own, big enough to scale, to hold.

_Hold._

She regrets each time she refused to carry him, called him too heavy or too old, at the word. Some might call it silly. Others might call it survivor's guilt. She knows it to be natural, as natural as this situation is not.

Brother's hand finds her back. It is a kiss of calloused skin against crushed velvet. The dragonglass cloak billows about the twins to reveal a matching dress, cut to impress each detail of her titillating figure onto awaiting eyes, ending mid-thigh. If a queen has ever walked the Rock, it is her. Any other time, she might have opted for something less revealing on an occasion like this, but she is desperate to soak up the warmth of home, to regress into whatever happiness still lives in the minerals of this place.

It is no use. The air is cold, nearly as cold as his hands had been when last she held them. Casterly Rock drips black, blocking out the sun. She has never seen it less prideful than today.

His tie whips into her face in the wind, bringing a division to the tear tracts yet unseen by either, and that is when she breaks.

"Parents aren't supposed to outlive their children, Jaime," she says finally.

His previous complaint seems to disappear. _Joffrey will wait._ It is all he will do, truly, lie and wait, unblinkingly, for the woman that has given the life what he has lost.

Time is for the living.

His other hand finds the front of her, settles between her breasts, grasping harshly and biting into now-bared skin. Any other time, it might be an invitation, an indication of want, but this is not that. This is _more_ carnal, somehow. Digits dig harshly, and it's as though he is pulling her beating heart toward the surface, finding a new way to feel her from the inside. Fingernails pierce the thing, though it is truly only skin, and part of her wants to tell him to stop because _someone will see._ She doesn't do that, though. She doesn't speak, move, breathe. She simply lets him hold her there, grip her flesh and absorb her pulse because it is too faint to hear. His fingers find the empty spaces left inside her by loss, stroke them, fill them.

For a moment, she is whole again. She is _a mother_ again.

The pain makes her feel alive.

"We are always young when we are here," he assures, releasing his grip in light of the red mark forming there, soothing the skin over in circles. "You know that."

_Perhaps that is it. Perhaps we are fifteen again, waiting for Father and Mother to find sleep such that we may find peace. Perhaps we are so young that he has not been born, and the silent air makes sense._

She lifts the wine glass to his lips, the way that she had when they _were_ too young, and when he sips, the lipstick living on the rim tinges his mouth like blood. He brushes it away against her, almost frantic to destroy the morbid mirage. Lips don't journey far until they're embossed in spun gold, lilting at her ear.

"I love you," he confesses, and it _is_ an admission. She knows that she has become _hard_ to love, a brick wall set ahead of the adulation he seeks, speaks. "I won't let you go." It is the truth, though. "Even if it hurts me. Even if it hurts you." They are something beyond blood and bone, before and after it, nerves and veins over muscle and marrow, a light that skin and hair can't hold, one that not even death can extinguish. "I am you, you are me."

He breathes. It is labored, and it is love. It is like half of his blood pulses through her, like she has lost too much. She hates to take it from him, because she hasn't earned it.

Yet.

_I could not save my son, and now I cannot even bury him._

"He loved you, too." His breath is heavy, like he has been carrying the words in his lungs all along. "He loved you more than anything."

 _He would have loved the lions,_ she thinks again, the past tense of brother's words wringing blood from her body in a way even more ruinous than his fingers. It hurts, but she doesn't mind. She deserves it. _He was one._

That stings and throbs, like alcohol in a wound, like wine settling into her split lips.

_Was._

Fingers wrap into hair, the only light left in the world, and she finds herself encompassed in his heat.

"Cerse?" The nickname is youth. It is laughter, and suddenly, the pain, the smells, the sounds serve to bring her breath back.

 _He_ was _, but we_ are _._

"Yes, Jay?"

The sun is all but setting now, darkness come to lull her son to his last sleep, and she knows now that she must do the same.

_At sunset, the lion finds repose._

"Welcome home."


	15. Celestia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y. Tears.
> 
> Y is for Yours, or "You shouldn't believe everything you hear about the gods and fate."

The game of thrones, the old maesters had once called it. Pretender this, heir that, the words little more than a whirlwind of banners billowing in dragon's breath. It makes little matter what colors prevail at the top of what hill, for they are all bathed in dragonfire sooner or later.

A dragon is of this world, though, and earthly power fades.

The gods play at games of their own.

Cersei wonders if Mother and Father had known what they were doing when they fucked this new era into being, if Mother's belly had swollen with she and brother like the globe that Father had taught her to worship as a child, if he had touched it as endearingly. She wonders if Joanna knew that she was seeing the faces of the gods when the pains passed and the blood cleared, if Tywin could see the wisps of hair sticking to their heads for the halos that they are.

She knows that to any other, she and brother appear cloudy, hazy, like a nebula in the great vacuum of filth that today's maesters call space, hotter than any human could stand but less substantial still. All of the light of the world lives there, in them, in their hair, and they are suns so bright that they may only see the other.

Surely, any being that may see herself reflected without a mirror is infinite, more than this life, glinting gold and sea foam, receding and coming back harder, green eyes piercing every enemy that deigns to glare back. Cersei is an idol of the night, for the moon lives in her skin, and she controls the tide as she steals brother's sleep in the name of passions and blasphemies.

_Surely gods cannot sin, not if we can make something so beautiful of it._

That is how Cersei feels when they place her crown prince into her arms, whole and victorious even in exhaustion. After thirty-seven hours of labor, after the foam stretcher mattress is soaked with sweat, after she has sworn three times despite reassurances otherwise that she is like to break brother's hand, she is home among the stale stenches and white walls. The boy is her reflection just as _he_ is. He is the beginning of the queenship that Father had always promised, never quite delivered. He is a divinity of the seven heavens come to grace the earth, to mount it, to hold it. His mane will blow white in the wind with starlight as he stands atop a mountain of his enemies. She will be _sure_ of it.

For a moment, she can't help but believe it. She has _won_ , and a smile creeps its way upon her twisted face even through the tears.

She can think of nothing more, only the three, only how the world will be theirs to take and rule when he is old enough. They will rip the stone of houses to the ground if it suits them, if any dare oppose them. Cities will burn at threats made on him, for she is fiercer still through acrid sweat and fleeting breath.

_No harm will come to you, little lion. Targaryen blood serves only as the field for our sigil now._

There is little need for dances when golden hair is a crown all its own.


	16. Purgatory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> H. Someone's greatest fear.
> 
> H is for hell, or "the time we almost ended up there."
> 
> This prompt is H on [this list.](http://regnant.tumblr.com/post/153892434665/send-me-characters-and-a-letter-and-ill-write)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a very special mother, and an even more special sister. A third of my soul.
> 
> For you, because of you, I live. I love.
> 
> I _hope_.
> 
> Happy Mother's Day.

_Heaven_.

The irony drives her _wild_.

Cersei has found heaven with brother beneath her, the world reduced to breath's hazy heat, the molten velvet of bare skin and bucket seats, instrument panel lights reflecting ocean waves in his emerald eyes.

There is no such softness to be found here, yet the heat of hell is equitably abscent. The tight leather caressing her thighs brushes against his unmoving hands what should do the same. They lie in a prison of roughspun sterility, she all red and gold, wound around him, his fickle garb of green and white.

They are ten and seven, and the maesters say that there may not be a _they_ , not ever again.

Their solace, their own Heaven, sleeps wrapped around a tree, its roots jutting into the road, mingling with coerced metal and broken ground. The place where they had learned the last sort of love unbeknownst to them, a luminescent realm of leather and flesh vice gripped in pearly teeth, a backseat caked with sand and the dust of shattered septs, has lost its light, and perhaps brother, too.

The machines outweigh the sound of Cersei's breath as they make their vile music, assuring that Jaime holds on, but only to the basest life, never to her. Mother is reduced to angry tears and desperate prayer, and Father's stoic face has shattered, leaving something she has scarcely seen since they were born.

It is that gripping darkness inside of him, forcing him into the throes of fear.

When Jaime stirs, Cersei realizes that her breath has been lost alongside his. The ones that they take taste recycled and false, of burning cold and isopropyl death, yet she feels greatful.

_"Cers."_

She shakes her head and brings a finger to his lips, bidding him not to waste the few that still live in his lungs. "Don't talk, my brother."

His eyes open, and she sees how poppy heat has stolen their glow, glazing them like the sea glass they would forage for as children. "Cers, am I dead?"

She laughs, then, and their breath forms a melody hanging in the air, their lips a lone moment apart. Her humor is a sophistry, a reckless one, for there is nothing happy about hospital beds, except for how maybe there is.

"You didn't think I'd let you go without me, did you?"


	17. Rose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> H. Someone's greatest fear. H is for hope, or "he can't love you the way that I can, so why do you still try?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Don't be a bummer, babe. Be my undercover lover, babe._
> 
> Warning for light knifeplay, smut, and Cersei/Rhaegar. Don't like, don't read.

_His mouth tastes different today. Sweeter._

It has become a morning ritual by now. At the start of each day, she and Rhaegar meet in the courtyard for a gasper, often the first of a fresh pack. Not even the headmaster usually makes it around this way so early, and Rhaegar loves to be alone. Some mornings, like this one, she lays over his lap on her back; if he is feeling particularly spry, or particularly melancholy, he even plays her a bar or two of his latest song.

"There's a lot of pressure on your mother and father to outlaw these, you know." She passes the jack back to him. The silver-blue rose logo glints in the half dark of the gas lamplight, leaving the morning cold and thick in the midst of this laziest of rising suns. "Flavored gaspers, I mean. Something about encouraging children to smoke. It's only for _my_ father's stake in the industry that we still have them." _If something makes Father money, it stays._

Rhaegar smokes Roses like his life depends on it, when of course, it really depends on him _quitting_. She's grown used to his scents, his personal brand of breath, the aroma of mint ice cream in the flavor capsule. This is the closest she has come in quite awhile to kissing him, the taste of his black dread breath atop paper and smoke. It's not that she _hates_ the idea of kissing him, of his form pressed into her hands, because he _is_ beautiful, and they _shall_ be married one day. Cersei knows, though, how much the act has hurt Jaime in the past, how greatly his own pain may scorn her, especially what with the night they had shared up at the cliffs during their nameday trip home some three weeks ago.

 _"There will be plenty of time for fucking when we are married,"_ she had teased just last week. _I'm not sure how long that mode of thought will hold with him._ Rhaegar finds her frigid in the recent absence of her more physical affections, and he holds little love for her own winter set against his own, not with his ever growing want to go _further_.

It makes no matter, by the end of the thing. Rhaegar has simply fallen into her grasp by her father's political mind; he is a prince, and yet, a tool. He might be particularly beautiful one, but there's little more to it than that. She has to remind herself of that these days when he stews in this manner of quiet. _I have Jaime. I am his, and he's mine now. He'll always be mine now._

That is when it hits her, that _Rhaegar_ may be someone else's one day, too.

"Something's different."

Rhaegar takes a drag, still as stone, the cherry glimmering with glee the only sign of life on his face. "Yes."

"Are you going to tell me what it is?" Lips purse with unfulfilled curiosities as she wonders what he may say next.

"I was up early today," he confesses around the filter. "Before you."

"Oh," she answers quietly, though it's hardly an answer at all. "Were you practicing?" She gestures openly to the harp cased next to them.

"No," he murmurs, "No, I wasn't."

She palms the cigarette, careful to avoid the sparked end as she pulls it to her mouth for a drag. _He is hiding behind it,_ and she refuses to let that happen. "You can tell me," she assures, gripping him by the chin and pulling him down to face her. Their breath coalesces in a sweet cloud as his head tilts further toward her own, and Cersei wonders if this is how they will finally meet again after these weeks, amidst ash and steaming air.

Rhaegar pulls back, though, and it shouldn't hurt, because he's only doing what she's done a hundred times. The end creeps toward the deep oxblood acrylic of her fingernails, forbidden by the school board just like the jack, but she hardly notices the bite of rose red heat when it's eclipsed with the lavender purple eyes before her. Hers stay locked onto his for a long while, but it's only as she ashes the cigarette, fearing burns, that she realizes he's been staring through her the entire time.

"Have you been having those thoughts again?"

Cersei knows all too well the doom and ruin that nest in her prince's mind, the wistful sources of his harp's crooning. She opens up the pack, lights a new cigarette with the wasted stump of the old one, holding it to his lips. His jaw turns sharp as he blows out the hit, and the thin lines rimming his eyes seem all the darker with the smoke there to rival them.

"I wish you could see the way my father looks at my mother."

Cersei scoffs, audibly unimpressed at this latest sorrow of his. At times, the way that his brain chemicals collude against those around him seems cause for concern, but this just _silly_. Still, she brings a smile to her face, brushing a lock of shining smoke-white hair from his brow. "Everyone sees the way that your father looks at your mother."

"No," he protests, violet eyes hardening. "No, not the way that they are at court, it's-- You should see them alone. He looks her like... Like she's on fire."

Cersei draws her knees upward, letting the soles of her sneakers caress her boy's leg. She is all too aware of the run that forms in her right stocking as it snags against one of the scales of the dragon sculpted beneath their bodies. It comes as no surprise. It's hardly the first pair she's ruined up here, and Balerion the Dread would scarcely hesitate to lay waste to an army, let alone some measly lace and nylon from across the Narrow Sea. She lets her free hand fall between her legs, keeping it warm whilst enveloped by the comfort of cold metal just under the shedding jacaranda tree. She slips the filter of their cigarette fully between her lips, purposefully, leaving him a taste of maraschino poison for his next drag. "You almost make it sound a bit sexy."

Rhaegar's gaze is purple flame, fixed to consume her own. "It's not sexy, it's _malicious_ , Cers." His voice is more like smoke, though; it shakes, all but disappears. The nickname feels foreign these days; only two have ever had the honor to speak it, and with Jaime so close and Rhaegar drifting, perhaps it only belongs to the one of them now. "He looks at her like she's on fire, and he has a cup of water, and he's just... _drinking_ it."

"...Is your father rather fond of fire, my love?" She keeps her composure as best she may. It would not do for her to be stunned into silence, for Rhaegar's own right hand to cramp up at a time like this.

"You know he is, Cersei," he rasps, and that's true. Aerys' assassination tactics are famed among the famous, if the list of enlightened may keep shrinking. The number of families subjected to his obscene tactics only grows. At this stage, though, she worries more for Rhaegar's own stratagems. He says her name, now, like a sin committed for the sake of obligation rather than a prayer. His voice doesn't shake with want for ingratiation, not like before, and even her best is hardly good enough to ignore that.

 _Change of subject._ "How do you think they got this way, then?"

"I don't think they did get this way. I think that's... I think that's just how you regard someone when you're stuck together and not in love."

"That could never be us, my sweet." _Could it? It would be awfully unfortunate if my brother had to murder you._ Rhaegar's blood is the last she'd like to splatter their hands, least of all after Melara. Her words are heady wisps disappearing into his thighs as her breath shudders, the cold of it somehow harsher on her lungs than the poison they inhale. "Not when I've always wanted you so badly."

Rhaegar's courage stutters; his lips quiver. He coughs. "It isn't just the looks, either, they're nothing," he continues, despondent even in the face of her half-feigned lust. "You should hear the vile things he spits at her... and..." He trails off, though, taking solace in the cigarette. Rhaegar thieves the butt of the other from her open hand, flicking it down into the foundation below them.

Cersei watches as the platinum blue rose of the filter disappears, as the last flicker of light come from it graces her eyes. Her nose wrinkles at the acrid smoke of paper and plastic dissipating into the air, and finally a drip of water reaches the murdered flower, snuffing out the stench at its source. "And what?"

Rhaegar bites his lip for a long time, summoning blood rubies to the surface. The dragon's essence beading there is a palpable indication of anxiety in this case, but one way or the other, Cersei can't help but wonder at the taste of him, if there is more or less iron to her prince than her brother.

No sooner should she think of Jaime than he may appear. Cersei absently fiddles with the cuffs of his letterman jacket as he makes his approach toward them, equipment bag in hand. She sits up, finding poise as Rhaegar rises from his perch over the highest of the metal arches rising to overlook the gardens, grasping for his harp and descending to the ground. "You ought to ask him."

As chosen approaches and destined retires, the smirk adorning Jaime's chiseled face unsettles her. _Perhaps the two of you aren't half so different after all._ The smell of winter fades, and the home of summer beaches and sticky confections fills her nose as brother hops up to meet her. She tugs him roughly into an embrace, sneaker-clad feet brushing his thighs as they swing and hang. "Hey."

She waits for him to chide her for climbing like he always does, to make some murmur of the danger of heights at the top of the lattice of arches forming dragonback even as he himself regards her from just below such peril. _Rather hypocritical of him._ Cersei herself can think of hundreds of dangerous acts Jaime has committed, namely the hundred foot drop off the cliffs back home when they were small. _You were never afraid._

She waits, and yet, her ears are never greeted with brother grumbling his care from beneath her. His mouth is tight as he grasps at one of the horns of Balerion's head. "What's his deal?" She pouts as he invades her space, wrapping one leg around his waist. Jaime can scarcely resist a chance to hold one of her feet, to feel complete. It's no different today as he seizes her free ankle, folding her leg upward until calf touches thigh and her clothed cunt is half-exposed. "He doesn't usually leave."

"Oh, I'm quite sure he just thinks I'm a cocktease." Jaime scowls at that; Cersei ignores it, though. His jealousy grows stale for her. "He told me to ask you." Her lips part for him as she inhales his scent, aching for peace. "Something about Aerys and Rhaella, he seemed awfully torn up."

Anxiety flickers over his face, and he chases it away with a hard kiss, seizing her hair with one hand. "I don't know why he'd tell you that." His eyes convey the truth, though; it is a lie, the sort you tell when you aren't ready to admit the truth. "I'm also not sure..." Jaime's fingers play over the soft lace of her panties, as of yet unbesmirched by their licentious ways. Cersei has a feeling that's about to change. "Are these new?"

" _Oh_ ," she cries, "you noticed." Cersei presses his fingers down, balling them into a fist around the fabric. "It's alright, they were made to be ruined."

Jaime has no issue obliging her, twisting and doing his best to rip the fabric from her jutting hips. He pulls and pulls until they bite into her skin like stinging teeth, but the stitching doesn't budge. "You sure?" He laughs, hollow, awkward and embittered at failing to meet her challenge, no matter how small. He has always taken too many pains to impress her.

Cersei rolls her eyes, her dwindling patience like a sparking green fire. She fishes through Jaime's back pocket, giving his ass a grab as she finds the jackknife he carries there. "Yes," she chastises, trapping his bottom lip between her teeth, clamping down hard enough that it will bruise later. He'll blame it on practice, though. He always does. "Just not that way." She produces the knife from behind his back, flipping it open to reveal the gilded Valyrian steel from its sheath.

Jaime hesitates, but she's expected that. "Cers... We've never used it..."

"So close?" She pushes the handle of the knife into his hand, dragging her finger over the business end of it. Her mind wanders back to a drop of blood budding from a scrape of just the same finger, words of a lost silver prince and murder, but she shakes it away. _Nonsense_. "It's alright, Jay." She presses the blade into the waistband of the underclothes, letting it graze her belly button on the way there. "There are lots of things we haven't done yet, and I want to try them all."

Under her guiding hand, he slips the steel under the fabric, pulling toward himself and breaking the bonds of thread. Crimson lace seems to snarl and hiss as the seams unfurl into a threadbare wound encircling the strip of golden down leading to her lips. Cersei busies her fingers with his tie and shirt, loosening buttons what seem all too eager to come undone. The slit grows, and she can feel the cold metal brushing up against her heat. The dull side of the blade circles her clit as the curved tip tangles with the coat of hair just above it. "Enough... Little brother."

The name brings a stir to his shallow breathing. It has always been a part of their games; even when things had been far more innocent than this, roles of authority have often crept into the bulk of their play. The knife itself, though, is newer, having appeared soon after the consummation of this... _relationship_. Cersei allows herself the word, the truth of it, as she slips the blade up over brother's chest, exerting the sweetest of light pressures. She indulges the two of them in a small break of skin just above his breastbone, wiping at the splatter of jewels adorning the sparse blonde hairs, transferring them to her tongue seamlessly.

She takes the tie into her hands, careful not to bloody it as she finds his eyes, fastening it behind them. "Best not to look down," she taunts, giving the bulge trapped in his trousers a light squeeze before returning to his chest, scraping messy sigils into it, red on a field of white. _How quaint._ "It's awfully high... Better not slip, baby."

He resists, pulling back half a pace before apparently realizing how bad of an idea that would be. "No, no, Cersei, _no_ ," Jaime breathes. "We shouldn't do this here."

She brushes a lock of golden hair away from his brow, soothing him amidst the futile protest. "We shouldn't do this _anywhere_."

Cersei feels Jaime growing against her thigh at that, and she finds mercy in her heart, for the moment. The pop of his zipper is a sigh calling forth pleasures as she guides him inside her. She works herself with her fingers just as he begins to thrust; the fear has always brought him to a quick finish, and heights may only exacerbate the problem. Their gasps and moans in blasts of steam, and just for a moment, she thinks it's a pity that he can't see the cloud that her climax paints against the sky.

She holds him there as they get themselves back, reassembling his wear into a skewed impression of what it had been upon his arrival. They laze together, basking in the heat and joy of the love they've just made, but it's only a moment before he speaks against her lips. "I'm glad I was wrong. About Rhaegar."

"Wrong?" The gold flecks in her emerald eyes burn darker at what Jaime suggests. "What has he done?"

"Well, you know, this morning, he was with the Stark girl. They were watching us, while we were drilling..." Jaime trails off, biting his lip as he hesitates. "They left quite early, and I had wondered if they went back to... But then he was with you, so..."

 _The Stark girl._ "Lyanna?" _She's even younger than we are._  " _Rhaegar_ was with _Lyanna_?" Cersei pushes back her urge to recoil at this new knowledge, the source of her prince's resentment... and the foreign flavor on his tongue. Cersei pictures them, the images ravaging her mind as they come unbidden, his alabaster hands wrapped in the ebony of her hair, his own sprinkling over it like snow on the asphalt.

It matters not. The silver boy can have his dragonglass girl, but their world will always be grey. A rose cannot bloom without the rising sun, and suddenly Cersei knows.

She knows that she only wants one sort of kiss from one sort of man, striking matches, catching embers, open flame, the sweet fire of cinnamon rivaling the calm of her lavender perfume.

_His torch is the only light in the world._

"You wanna smoke?"


	18. Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I don't crave an intimacy that involves the touch of a hand, but instead one that causes a flame to burn in my soul" -s.s
> 
> F. An absent look or touch. F is for faith, or "I'll never stop wanting you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a sweet drabble for you all.

Since she has been married, touch has been all but a luxury.

Jaime longs for a time when they spent nights in each other's arms, finding new ways to elicit pleasured sounds, finding each other, finding themselves.

Since she has been married, Cersei has been all but lost.

Their love is crowded rooms, stolen glances, hushed voices over the phone line as fingers work between their thighs on opposite sides of the Keep. He sustains his hunger by pushing on days-old bruises, letting the ghosts of love bites haunt him into the late hours of the night. They don't sleep anymore, not half so well as they should, and truly how might they? Jaime aches with phantom pains from being torn apart. There is a certain emptiness to his veins without her, as though hers were woven with his in the womb.

The night has never been so black without the sun of her hair.

No, it's a few months into the marriage that he realizes mornings are his favorite now. The piercing sea foam of her eyes pre-makeup supersedes the need to bloody his teeth, his want of sleep. It's a chaste kiss over coffee, a stealthy graze of his hand over the swell of her belly where their child lives, a whisper of all the things he'll do to her when they find a moment in the office alone.

It's the way she loses her breath when he fulfills his promises, for the way the two share lungs, no one else ever could.

The further the world pushes them apart, the harder he holds onto this. His heart yearns to twine with her own as it once had before they broke in two; every beat deepens a break. He walks around hollow until she fills him up with gold again, up against her desk, in the alleyway where they smoke, atop the conference room table they've tantalized each other over for hours now.

Soon, he murmurs into the patchwork, soon.

She is better at the game than him. She has done this before. For years, Cersei had seduced her betrothed with all but her body, reeling in those violet eyes anytime they might stray in another direction. Cersei can ignore the burning between her thighs with a subtle rub, a diverted attention, the bite of a lip. Jaime can afford no such luxuries. His cock aches at the spread of her thighs as she swivels in the office chair, the curve of her back as she tiptoes to reach the top of the whiteboard, the pop of her lips as she smacks chewing gum, the perfect punctuation to her sentence, just for him. She regards him from across the room, for her words belong to everyone, but the actions are his own.

_Our eyes meet, and I burn._


	19. Leather

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> H. Someone's greatest fear. H is for haunt, or "He'll never do you like this."
> 
> The eve of Cersei and Robert's wedding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! As a brief warning, this chapter contains mild kink content, namely references to impact play and knife and blood play.

She lays there dozing after their loving, a druzy opal wrapped in the reddened clay and gilded ore of their sheets, for the very last time, and Jaime realizes just how badly he wishes for the means to pluck her from the ground.

Tomorrow, sister will be wrapped in tulle and pearls and lace from Myr and given like a horse to a man that doesn't even want her. He sits hung up on the woman that Rhaegar stole from him, when he could have had thousands, has had, yet Father deems him fit for this.

_For Cersei._

_I could stand Rhaegar. He was a dragon, not a pig._

Though the Baratheon heraldry may be a stag what boasts elegance and royalty, and Jaime must remind himself that it is, they are the only two to know true gold. Cersei will keep _her_ name, _her_ sigil, _her_ house; no, _ours, ours, ours,_ for a lioness may find a buck between her teeth at any moment.

 _"It is a marriage,"_ she insists, _"not a relationship."_

As the moment approaches, though, her words do less and less to assure him. Their honeyed glow dulls, crystallizes, and he wonders how soon they might be a fossil of memory, white granules slipping through his fingers like Rock sand. He can hardly stand it; the thought of an unwashed frat boy crawling on top of her, suit splattered with half a horn of ale, seeking to claim something he deems to be his.

It has never been that way with the two of them. They have kissed and touched since he could remember. It has grown into a wicked game the older they have grown, stalking, pouncing, maws locking, chasing, craving, but never taking. Their love is a thing to share, a thing that, would they be parted, shan't exist save for the clawing torment of needing it back. They are truly one when they are wound together in agony, and this marriage is naught but a cheap imitation of that. He might fuck Cersei, but he could hardly dream of loving her, and though it should come as a comfort, the notion serves to make Jaime all the more enraged.

She deserves better than this.

_If only she'd let me give it to her._

"I know what you're thinking," she murmurs sleepily.

Her voice is a dream, much like this night, and he is jarred from the real way of it at the sound of sister's speech. "No, you don't," he whispers, all husk and defiance.

"You're thinking of running away again." She shakes their smoke-laden curls from her eyes, pulling his face closer to hers. "To Essos."

"Taena is in Myr," he reminds, and the words are a plea, as though they may seduce her across the sea, into the arms of an old friend.

"As much as I may love her," Cersei murmurs behind her after-bliss cigarette, "I do love my head more, and yours." The lavender damiana cocktail of sister's smoke serves to intoxicate him, much like the skin of her neck, and both all but choke with the intensity. "They'd find us," she coughs, "Father, he would find us. You know he would, Jaime."

Jaime doesn't know that, though. He is far more familiar with the arrangements Father has made to thwart Cersei's out-and-out refusal to couple with her old man's murderer. He holds her future hostage, her very stake in the family, not the one that they have been born into, but the one that sustains them. She'll never be _made_ , not like Jaime has been these two years, unless she brings the monster into her bed.

Still, he agrees. Outwardly, Cersei will admit none of this, and so why would he? Curls bounce with the nod of his head as she slips the amber filter between his lips, stealing his speech. "It's going to be fine," she insists. "It's a m--"

"Marriage, not a relationship," he sputters, "I know, you said that."

Fingers graze his back what still stings from the leather and steel of their play, the paperwhite scrapes she's painted there like fears writ on the surface, the lingering ice of flogger tails a torturous intimacy as she traces it again. "If you _know_ ," she intimates, "surely you needn't repeat such follies, my brother."

"It won't be such a folly tomorrow night when--"

"We mustn't speak of tomorrow," Cersei breathes between the nips she lays at his hips, "not when the night is so young." The scratches intensify; disappear, then, and suddenly she is forcing the instruments of their passion into his space. "You belong to me, Jaime. We both know that." Beloved butterfly knives leave their impression at either of his hips, just deeply enough to bite, spilling ruby jewels where bruise purple ink already swirls about the bones. "But tonight, right now..." The blades withdraw from their newly-made sheath, and her fingers are pressing at either side of new wounds, bringing blood to bead at the surface. She shifts their position, taking her place atop him. Exposed sharp edges press between them, hungry for flesh. "I want you to play with me like I'm yours." Her back arches; sister pushes her tits into brother's hands, never relenting until he grabs, pinches the sensitive peaks to her heart's content. "I want you to do it because I _am_."

Before he even realizes what's happening, sister is on her belly, ciggy stashed between her teeth. She takes his hand in her own, and soon enough she's wrapping his fingers around the handle of the flogger, guiding the tails over her shivering back, flipping one of her prized butterfly knives between her fingers in a flourish. She whips her head upward, burying their crime in a sudden puff of smoke.

“Play with me,” she says, for the second time, and this time, it’s less a command and more so an invitation.

So, twin happily occupies his space next to twin, leaving his penultimate marks on her, if only in places that no one will see. She moans through every stroke at the back of her thighs, each scrape and bead on the soles of those luscious feet. Jaime closes his eyes, savors the sound, knowing that this could well be the last time for quite a long time, but that doesn’t matter half so much as it should after all.

Even if the beast may muddy sister's hair with the stink of his maw, oils can always remedy that. The morrow's lace is far too fragile to be permanent; after all, he'll always have her in leather.


	20. Brother

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ❛ nothing we feel is understood by anyone else. ❜

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The inevitable narcissistic genderplay exploration chapter. No JxC fic would be complete without something of this caliber. Enjoy.

Her hips have widened.

Jaime's riding breeches don't fit her quite so well as they used to do. He's favored her by head and a half, for quite some time to tell it true; yet, she must cinch the waist only half so far to accommodate herself as this time last year. She fiddles with the drawstring, biting her lip in frustration. The elastic lazes over the jutting knives of her bones, and she sneers at the mirror.

Manicured fingers curl around the bottle she’s stowed on the armoire just beside, just as curvaceous as she. It’s a starry gold from the Summer Isles, a bottle she’s filched from Mother, and not the first of the evening. Sin lingers on her lips as she surveys herself, all heavy swordbelt and heavier tits, comical and foreboding as can be. She’s only a fragment of the fire she should be, even in a uniform spun of ritual murder, for what has the joust ever been if not such? Cersei grits her teeth, catching one on the bottle, almost angry that it hasn’t brought her the bliss she craves on this weekend home. Is such skullduggery even worth it when the prize is pyrite?

She snorts, and battleborn or ripe for birthing, that just might be the most mannish thing Cersei has done in ages. Mother pretends not to notice their appropriations of the wine cellar, the liquor cabinet and its watered contents. _Just as she ignores everything else._

His hand finds her side, an accursed curve where his own chest refuses the indignity of sloping. Cersei thinks him a wretched thief for that, for taking the magic of masculinity and enjoying the view of what he’s left for her after.

Perhaps she might do the same, though. Her index finger toys with the rim of the bottle, open and soaked as a cunt. The neck, though, is slim and virile, small enough to slip inside of secret places, wide enough to be noticed. They’re just like that, aren’t they? She is just the vulnerable half of this arrangement, soft and slick to his sinew and scars.

Her hand slips over his belly, feeling the firm washboard that he’s chiseled there through hours and hours of drilling. Her vision wanders elsewhere as her eyes find themselves closing, leaving her free in the dark. Behind the shield of closed lids, she can almost see it, the two born as they should have been.

To her mind, her hands survey her own chest. She can feel the heat of her fingers, the wind from the open floor-to-ceiling window playing at her skin. The breeze caresses her hipbones (oh, and his, too, always his, too) as she slides her fingers into the waistband of his own pajama bottoms, expanding the gap between skin and cotton. She moves lower, slow as a trickle of water, finding his manhood and grasping it firmly.

The first moan comes from deep in her own throat, not his. Even with her hand tight and dry, he stiffens as she strokes him, invariably in tune with the supple expanse of her tapered fingers. It’s perfect. Her hips rock along with his as she pleasures him; pleasures _herself_. Heat gathers at the apex of her thighs, and she's so close. She knows she could get there with no hands, no vibe, nothing inside, nothing to disturb this. She doesn't think of Mother and her prying eyes, Rhaegar and his wolf bitch, their bloody maths professor and his love for calls home. She doesn't think of anything. The moment stretches, thins until it isn't real, until it's something better than any of that. She can almost see it, can almost feel, almost, almost, almost there...

And then he speaks; ruins it, much how men ruin everything.

“What are you doing?”

"Touching my cock," she chides, eyes snapping open.

“You... Yes, of course.” His fingers tighten at her hip, bunching in the leather. “Yours,” he agrees, summoning his most desperate tone of voice. “Always yours.”

“Mine,” she bites back, fierce as her maned counterpart; perhaps fiercer. “Always mine.”

The words intrude upon her bliss, unbidden. _Should have been mine._

She doesn’t sully the moment with that, though. The atmosphere is thick with musk, sea, cinnamon and basil and allspice, citrus and lavender, steel and glass. Their scents kiss in the air, and before she knows it, their bodies begin to do the same. Her fingers merge with the spaces between brother's own as they grind together. Jaime drizzles wine between them, slicking their bellies in the bright debasements bottled on the other side of the Narrow Sea.

She giggles, shivering against him as the pace quickens. Friction just might reign king between them, except for how she does. “Mother would be furious if she knew you did that.”

“I don’t want to please my mother.” His brow furrows, his eyes hardening. “I want to please my brother.”

 _Brother_.

It's almost shameful how wet she becomes at that. The world is coming apart. Halos rage behind her eyes, and a storm seethes through the curtains. Oh, but that's only his voice, isn't it? Raw, a roar, violent as sea spray comes to cover her chest; to watch a lion come undone is quite the privilege indeed.

To join him, though, is greater.


End file.
